The Magic Mountain

"The thundering success of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain … required the intervention of the rector to keep us from spending the whole night awake, waiting for Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat to kiss. Or the rare tension of all of us sitting up on our beds in order not to miss a word of the disordered philosophical duels between Naptha and his friend Settembrini. The reading that night lasted for more than an hour and was celebrated in the dormitory with a round of applause."

"I read this while my mother was ill, dying from cancer, and she decided to try to read it as well. We often shared books and music and so forth, but she couldn’t get through it because it was just too personal and too real. She had to put that book down; it’s pretty sad.”"

"To reread this would probably occupy me for the entire length of time I was stranded on the island, and I’d be compelled the entire time."

"This novel about a young man’s seven years in a sanitarium for tuberculosis is quite possibly my favorite book of all time. A new translation from the German by John E. Woods in 1996 makes this marvelous read more beautiful than ever."

"This is about a young man who goes to a sanitarium in the Swiss Alps to visit his tubercular cousin and winds up staying there for seven years. To paraphrase the Stefon character from SNL, “it’s got everything: love, illness, art, philosophy, religion…”"