![]() ![]() Never quite letting go of my phone, I drifted in and out of the 796-page novel. I took screenshots of the death toll: 100 Americans dead from the novel coronavirus, 1,000 Americans, 10,000 Americans. As the world was ending and there were a million new things to process, why did I rush out to buy a Weimar novelist?įor the first weeks in Massachusetts, I sat in the spare room and read tweets and The Magic Mountain. Why would I do that to myself, just as everything I really enjoyed - bars, friends, flights - had suddenly been taken away from me? On the drive out of the city it kept nagging me. I’m not one of those bores who reads colossal, painful tomes just to feel educated. It’s huge, I thought, as the cashier frantically wiped it down (we didn’t wear masks at this point.) I’m never going to read this. That was how my pandemic began.Įven paying for it at a second-hand bookstore near Columbia gave me pause. One of them was The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, published in 1924. I would read the kind of books that - the clock constantly ticking, reminding me of all the things I hadn’t done - I’d never had time for, or never made time for. ![]() ![]() If we were going to be at my wife’s parents for several weeks, waiting for things to get less scary in the city, I was going to hide away and read. I left New York with two bags loaded with pasta and canned chickpeas and - more importantly - a crate of books. ![]()
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