It's a great world to enter—I stumbled upon it in college a couple decades ago, didn't really understand it, but was fascinated by it. Revisited it at the beginning of COVID lockdowns and still found it enchanting. I will certainly read it again.
I read MM in 2020 and was incredibly impressed; it's almost certainly in my top-10 list of novels. But reading it was a strangely protracted experience because once I put it down, I struggled to pick it back up, despite having been thoroughly engrossed during every reading session. I've heard people say similar things about reading Pynchon or Henry James, but MM is the outlier for me. I gather nothing of the sort entered into your experience.
We used Magic Mountain's opague English translation to explain what's about to happen to Education, as the OpenAI 'GPG for Teachers' Daeth Star rolls out its New CCSS v 2.0 Bedlam, together with new Federal protections against State limitation, to capture American school districts into a GPT capture-model borrowed from Amazon:
Like NASA before it, outsourcing and offshoring to Space X, with 18,000 Fed employees swollen with 20,000 Space X NGO contractors, yet still stuck on the ground here on Earth, not vacationing at Hilton Luna or sailing through skies of Mars on a Princess Tharsis cruise, Education follows the same arc.
So I dug into my Teacher bag of tricks, and came up with a RPE, a Role Playing Exercise, to demonstrate for you the stakes, between AI-CCSS and AI-Mentor:
—- AI-CCSS
[Teacher] “Class, today we’re doing a fun unit on our own bodies, and Mr. CCSS is going to lead a presentation about goose bumps! Isn’t that fun!?"
[Student] “Teacher, you mean, like, the movie Goose Bumps, sksksks?”
[CCSS] ‘Hello Class, I’m Mr. CCSS, a Special Educator all the way from WADC! Today we’re going to learn how goose bumps happen on our skin. Put down your pencils, close your notebooks and listen carefully. Listen only to me.”
“Goose bumps is a little contrivance of the sebaceous glands, which secrete the fatty, albuminous substance that oils your skin and keeps it supple, and pleasant to feel of. Not very appetizing, maybe, but without it the skin would be all withered and cracked. Without the cholesterin, it is hard to imagine touching the human skin at all. These sebaceous glands have little erector-muscles that act upon them, and when they do so, then you are like the lad when the princess poured the pail of minnows over him. Your skin gets like a file, and if the stimulus is very powerful, the hair ducts are erected too, the hair on your head bristles up and the little hairs on your body, like quills upon the fretful porcupine — and you can say, like the youth in the story, that now you know how to shiver and shake." [from The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann]
[Teacher] “Thank you Mr. CSSS. Wasn’t that interesting?! Any questions"
[Student] “Teacher, is that like when I pick my buggers, I get nose hairs?”
[Teacher] “Now we’re going to take a checklist quiz to test your memory!”
[Students] (Suicidal ideation … again … every day … the CCSS checklists.)
—- AI-Mentor
P2P, One-on-One, UDL Individualized Achievement
‘Demonstrate Your Understanding’
[Teacher] (Grading papers because the Students already know what to do.)
[AI-Mentor] “Hi, Student! You know that feeling when you’re listening to a song, and suddenly your skin prickles like it’s remembering something you’ve forgotten? Let’s explore that together:”
Path A (The Comic Artist): Create a 3-panel comic strip showing the internal biological process of getting goosebumps from a cause (e.g., cold, fear, awe).
Path B (The Myth-Buster): Record a 60-second "TikTok" style video explaining why the phrase "made my hair stand on end" is scientifically accurate.
Path C (The Connector): Find a song, poem, or scene from a movie that powerfully evokes an emotion that would cause goosebumps. Write a short paragraph connecting the art to the body's physical reaction.
Path D (The Philosopher): The original text calls this a "defence mechanism." Do you think getting goosebumps when listening to beautiful music is also a defense? If not, what might it be? Write a brief reflection.
The "AI Mentor" Role: AI isn't a fount of all knowledge, a Read and Repeat(R). It's the architect of this multi-path UDL mentored exploration. It provides the resources, the choices, and the scaffolding. The student's agency is in choosing their own path and constructing their own meaning.
DoED may well make of AI-Mentor’s promise, instead a New CCSS v. 2.0 Bedlam?"
I read Natasha Wimmer’s translation of 2666 this year and fell in love with Bolaño. Very often, out of the blue I will think of 2666 and share your wish that book were twice as long.
I also read the entire Lonesome Dove Quartet. The original book was a reread for me but it was great to read it as part of the larger set.
I read Asimov extensively this year. His entire Robot, Galaxy, and Foundation series. I had read pieces over the years but never all in chronological order.
This year was actually my first time reading it in Norwegian so I read was Nicolai Henriksen's translation. Previously I've only ever read the Garnett translation, but the next time I read it in English I'd like to try out one of the newer translations.
I actually read Substack Darling Stoner this year, and loved it, but nobody here needs another voice to the chorus. Instead, let me put in a plug for Mircea Cartarescu's Nostalgia, a collection of short stories that is luminous, strange and occasionally terrific (in the sense of frightening).
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy: gorgeous, enraging, I don't watch BookTok reaction content but I would watch someone go on a villain origin story at every word out of Angel Clare's mouth.
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym: Delicate, wistful, wry, and withal as terrifying a horror story as anything King wrote.
Persuasion, Jane Austen: another Substack Darling, or is that Emma? Deserved, either way. Such a lovely winter twilight of a book. One to reread just as you pass the Solstice.
The Complete Stories, Flannery o'Connor: Quiet and nasty and beautifully-observed.
Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance accompanied me on a hiking trip in early summer. It's fantastic, and although I was I was physically in the Balkans, my mind was in 1970s India as I spent my mornings and evenings reading it. Wonderful.
“Thunderclap” The author’s name escapes me. Simply fascinating novel and a fine and well researched read about Dutch painters in the age of Vermeer. It’s my stand out read. Together with “There are Rivers in the Sky” by the wonderfully imaginative and interesting Elif Shafak.
Austen, “Emma.” Blew me away. A solid block of thought. An experimental novel, as Henry said.
Alison Lurie, “The Nowhere City” (Yes, that city). Captures a time, mid-60’s, and a place. Lurie was big, critically (Pulitzer) and commercially. Martin Seymour-Smith called her “undoubtedly the technically most accomplished novelist since the war.” (“Novels and Novelists”) She’s little read today, it seems.
Charles Portis, “Masters of Atlantis” Everyone’s favorite underrated writer. Takes a while to get into his comic aesthetic in this one. If you’re antsy in the first third stick with it. Recommend reading this one aloud.
It's gotta be the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann! I had to ration it out because I didn't want to leave that world.
It's a great world to enter—I stumbled upon it in college a couple decades ago, didn't really understand it, but was fascinated by it. Revisited it at the beginning of COVID lockdowns and still found it enchanting. I will certainly read it again.
I read the Michael Henry heim translation of death in Venice, and very much enjoyed it. Wish he would have translated some of the longer novels.
Seconded! I read it this year, and it was far and away My Book of the Year.
Which translation did you read? I’m trying to decide whether to read the old one widely circulating, or spring for the newer one.
I read the one by John E. Woods because it was what my library had, but I am eagerly awaiting Susan Bernofsky's.
Incredible book
I read MM in 2020 and was incredibly impressed; it's almost certainly in my top-10 list of novels. But reading it was a strangely protracted experience because once I put it down, I struggled to pick it back up, despite having been thoroughly engrossed during every reading session. I've heard people say similar things about reading Pynchon or Henry James, but MM is the outlier for me. I gather nothing of the sort entered into your experience.
I read this in German for school but nowI keep hoping someone will do a slow read of The Magic Mountain in English.
We used Magic Mountain's opague English translation to explain what's about to happen to Education, as the OpenAI 'GPG for Teachers' Daeth Star rolls out its New CCSS v 2.0 Bedlam, together with new Federal protections against State limitation, to capture American school districts into a GPT capture-model borrowed from Amazon:
"Trying to explain the ramifications of Federal DoED’s CCSS commercial commodification of US Education to Parents is a tremendous challenge, especially as the DoED head McMahon pretends that: ‘Trump Is Keeping His Promise!©’ — (e.g. ‘I Will Eliminate the DoED in the First 24 Hours!’)
Like NASA before it, outsourcing and offshoring to Space X, with 18,000 Fed employees swollen with 20,000 Space X NGO contractors, yet still stuck on the ground here on Earth, not vacationing at Hilton Luna or sailing through skies of Mars on a Princess Tharsis cruise, Education follows the same arc.
DoED will begin outsourcing and offshoring to NGOs that will control the size and shape of our Students’ AI-agentic experience: Khan Academy to EduTech and now Open AI’s GPT for Teachers!©. It’s a New Gold Rush Stampede.
So I dug into my Teacher bag of tricks, and came up with a RPE, a Role Playing Exercise, to demonstrate for you the stakes, between AI-CCSS and AI-Mentor:
—- AI-CCSS
[Teacher] “Class, today we’re doing a fun unit on our own bodies, and Mr. CCSS is going to lead a presentation about goose bumps! Isn’t that fun!?"
[Student] “Teacher, you mean, like, the movie Goose Bumps, sksksks?”
[CCSS] ‘Hello Class, I’m Mr. CCSS, a Special Educator all the way from WADC! Today we’re going to learn how goose bumps happen on our skin. Put down your pencils, close your notebooks and listen carefully. Listen only to me.”
“Goose bumps is a little contrivance of the sebaceous glands, which secrete the fatty, albuminous substance that oils your skin and keeps it supple, and pleasant to feel of. Not very appetizing, maybe, but without it the skin would be all withered and cracked. Without the cholesterin, it is hard to imagine touching the human skin at all. These sebaceous glands have little erector-muscles that act upon them, and when they do so, then you are like the lad when the princess poured the pail of minnows over him. Your skin gets like a file, and if the stimulus is very powerful, the hair ducts are erected too, the hair on your head bristles up and the little hairs on your body, like quills upon the fretful porcupine — and you can say, like the youth in the story, that now you know how to shiver and shake." [from The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann]
[Teacher] “Thank you Mr. CSSS. Wasn’t that interesting?! Any questions"
[Student] “Teacher, is that like when I pick my buggers, I get nose hairs?”
[Teacher] “Now we’re going to take a checklist quiz to test your memory!”
[Students] (Suicidal ideation … again … every day … the CCSS checklists.)
—- AI-Mentor
P2P, One-on-One, UDL Individualized Achievement
‘Demonstrate Your Understanding’
[Teacher] (Grading papers because the Students already know what to do.)
[AI-Mentor] “Hi, Student! You know that feeling when you’re listening to a song, and suddenly your skin prickles like it’s remembering something you’ve forgotten? Let’s explore that together:”
Path A (The Comic Artist): Create a 3-panel comic strip showing the internal biological process of getting goosebumps from a cause (e.g., cold, fear, awe).
Path B (The Myth-Buster): Record a 60-second "TikTok" style video explaining why the phrase "made my hair stand on end" is scientifically accurate.
Path C (The Connector): Find a song, poem, or scene from a movie that powerfully evokes an emotion that would cause goosebumps. Write a short paragraph connecting the art to the body's physical reaction.
Path D (The Philosopher): The original text calls this a "defence mechanism." Do you think getting goosebumps when listening to beautiful music is also a defense? If not, what might it be? Write a brief reflection.
The "AI Mentor" Role: AI isn't a fount of all knowledge, a Read and Repeat(R). It's the architect of this multi-path UDL mentored exploration. It provides the resources, the choices, and the scaffolding. The student's agency is in choosing their own path and constructing their own meaning.
DoED may well make of AI-Mentor’s promise, instead a New CCSS v. 2.0 Bedlam?"
Read the piece at: https://substack.com/@thebookofmarvels/note/c-179779954
Earthlings absolutely blew my mind
Sorry, wrong thread
Crime and Punishment - didn’t realize how many great books follow from this one
Convenience Store Woman - a weirdly loveable narrator
Earthlings absolutely blew my mind!
One of my favorites, too!
I finally read John Williams's Stoner and thought it was beautiful. Also: Pale Fire, from which I am still recovering.
I am just listening to John Williams's Augustus, which I read several years ago. One of the increasingly rare epistolatory novels, and lots of fun!
Wonderful. I think “Stoner” is unjustly neglected. Amazing what a novelist’s eye can see in the arc of one man’s “small” life
Piranesi by Susana Clark
I adore that book , thought it was one of the best books I’ve read in past 20 years
Moby Dick What an amazing book.
What can you say about it
Astoundingly beautiful
“2666” by Roberto Bolaño. What a pleasure to read him in Spanish. I finished those thousand pages wishing there were a thousand more
I read Natasha Wimmer’s translation of 2666 this year and fell in love with Bolaño. Very often, out of the blue I will think of 2666 and share your wish that book were twice as long.
I read Nocturno de Chile this year and his writing is so beautiful and the stream of consciousness compelling. 2666 seems daunting though!
Blew me away
Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. We can always begin again.
Milkman - Anna Burns, engrossing and a proper page-turner.
I absolutely loved this book. Stylistically inventive but still very engaging and readable.
I enjoyed Exogenesis by Peco Gaskovski.
I also read the entire Lonesome Dove Quartet. The original book was a reread for me but it was great to read it as part of the larger set.
I read Asimov extensively this year. His entire Robot, Galaxy, and Foundation series. I had read pieces over the years but never all in chronological order.
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson blew my mind.
My indisputable bangers are:
- Helm by Sarah Hall
- North Woods by Daniel Mason
- The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner
- The Echoes by Evie Wyld
- Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson
- The Odyssey by Homer [tran. by Daniel Mendelsohn]
- Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry
- The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds
and
- Shadowplay by Joseph O'Connor
Oo I've been hearing good things about Lonesome Dove! Adding it to the list.
Loved the corner that held them!
Anna Karenina - I've read it once a year for the last five years and plan to keep doing so for as long as possible.
The best newish book I read this year was My Struggle, Volume Two. Completely fascinating and often very funny.
Anna Karenina is spectacular! Just out of curiosity, have you tried different translations? Do you have a favorite?
This year was actually my first time reading it in Norwegian so I read was Nicolai Henriksen's translation. Previously I've only ever read the Garnett translation, but the next time I read it in English I'd like to try out one of the newer translations.
I actually read Substack Darling Stoner this year, and loved it, but nobody here needs another voice to the chorus. Instead, let me put in a plug for Mircea Cartarescu's Nostalgia, a collection of short stories that is luminous, strange and occasionally terrific (in the sense of frightening).
Did you like Solenoid?
I haven’t read it. It is on the list - would you recommend?
I only read some of it going to try again
Oh wait shit we're allowed to say more than one!
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy: gorgeous, enraging, I don't watch BookTok reaction content but I would watch someone go on a villain origin story at every word out of Angel Clare's mouth.
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym: Delicate, wistful, wry, and withal as terrifying a horror story as anything King wrote.
Persuasion, Jane Austen: another Substack Darling, or is that Emma? Deserved, either way. Such a lovely winter twilight of a book. One to reread just as you pass the Solstice.
The Complete Stories, Flannery o'Connor: Quiet and nasty and beautifully-observed.
Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance accompanied me on a hiking trip in early summer. It's fantastic, and although I was I was physically in the Balkans, my mind was in 1970s India as I spent my mornings and evenings reading it. Wonderful.
One of my all time favourites a total masterpiece
Agreed! Any other books you think I’d like given how much I enjoyed this and the fact I’m still thinking about it months later?
“Thunderclap” The author’s name escapes me. Simply fascinating novel and a fine and well researched read about Dutch painters in the age of Vermeer. It’s my stand out read. Together with “There are Rivers in the Sky” by the wonderfully imaginative and interesting Elif Shafak.
Austen, “Emma.” Blew me away. A solid block of thought. An experimental novel, as Henry said.
Alison Lurie, “The Nowhere City” (Yes, that city). Captures a time, mid-60’s, and a place. Lurie was big, critically (Pulitzer) and commercially. Martin Seymour-Smith called her “undoubtedly the technically most accomplished novelist since the war.” (“Novels and Novelists”) She’s little read today, it seems.
Charles Portis, “Masters of Atlantis” Everyone’s favorite underrated writer. Takes a while to get into his comic aesthetic in this one. If you’re antsy in the first third stick with it. Recommend reading this one aloud.
One of my best listens ever was Donna tart reading true grit. A blast from beginning to end!
Agreed! Great voice. I also only read bleak house because I think she mentions it in her forward..
- The Perfect Spy, John le Carré
- Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford
- Orbital, Samantha Harvey
- Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, John Crowley