Happy Halloween! Happy midweek everyone! How has the year been going for you so far? I hope that the year has been kind to everyone. If not, I hope you will experience a reversal of fortune in the last two months of the year. More importantly, I hope everyone is happy and healthy, in body, mind, and spirit.

With the midweek comes a fresh WWW Wednesday update, my first this year. WWW Wednesday is a bookish meme hosted originally by SAM@TAKING ON A WORLD OF WORDS. The mechanics for WWW Wednesday are quite simple, you just have to answer three questions:

  1. What are you currently reading?
  2. What have you finished reading?
  3. What will you read next?
www-wednesdays
What are you currently reading?

My foray into works of European literature is currently in full swing. I am reading Marcel Proust’s Within A Budding Grove, the second volume in his magnum opus, Remembrance of Things Past/In Search of Lost Time. After putting on hold reading the books, I finally started with the first volume, Swann’s Way last year. With nothing to hold me back now (except for one missing volume of the seven-piece) my journey through the French writer’s oeuvre is also in full swing. Like the first volume, Within A Budding Grove (also published as In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower) is narrated by an unnamed character. The book is further divided into two parts: Madame Swann at Home and Place-Names: The Place.

The first part of the book, which I just finished, charted the friendship of the narrator and the Swann family, particularly his friendship with the Swann’s daughter, Gilberte. Gilberte and the narrator forged a friendship; the narrator’s ruminations and his growing feelings for Gilberte drove the first part of the book. I guess this establishes the center of the novel, the narrator’s budding romance with Gilberte as the catalyst. However, love can be complicated, as the narrator would learn. The second half seems to be headed in a different direction: the pangs of love. Like the first book, Within A Budding Grove is meant to be enjoyed leisurely. The descriptions and the language are both beautiful. I will share more of my impressions of the book in this week’s First Impression update.

What have you finished reading?

Nobel Laureate in Literature Thomas Mann has long been on my list of writers whose works I want to read. His first book that captured my interest was The Magic Mountain. It has been almost a decade since this fated encounter. It took time for me to obtain a copy of the book and I was finally able to do so last year. With my burgeoning anticipation, I made the book part of my 2023 Top 23 Reading List. Fun fact. I initially thought the book related to the Disney film Race To Witch Mountian. I am no longer sure what made me think so.

Anyway, at the heart of one of the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is Hans Castorp, the only son of a Hamburg merchant family. The time was the decade immediately prior to the First World War. Orphaned when he was young, he was then raised by his grandfather and, following his grandfather’s death, by his maternal uncle James Tienappel. We first met him when he was in his early twenties and was studying for a career in shipbuilding. The crux of the story was when he decided to pay a visit to his cousin, an officer in training named Joachim Ziemssen who was suffering from tuberculosis and was convalescing in the International Sanatorium Berghof in the Swiss Alps near the town of Davos. What was supposed to be a three-week stay became longer as his health was failing him. The longer he stayed, the more Hans got immersed in the world of the titular “magic mountain.” He got acquainted with the other denizens of the sanatorium, most of whom came from other parts of the world. The characters he met were a microcosm of pre-war Europe. Mann takes the reader across a spectrum of subjects, such as death and the inevitable flow of time. I must say that while the book was challenging, it was worth the long wait. I can’t wait to read Buddenbrooks next.

What will you read next?