jim's Updates

jim is 75% done with Bruce Springsteen - Like

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 11:48:25 -0700

jim is 75% done with Bruce Springsteen - Like a Killer in the Sun.
jim wrote: isn’t it funny how MAGIC of all things is probably bruce’s most currently relevant album……��. haha…�� god.

jim added 'Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie'

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 02:37:19 -0700

jim gave 3 stars to Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie (Hardcover) by Thomas Mann
bookshelves: 3-star
i keep saying this but thomas mann is so funny for writing this ponderous tome about the decline of his own family and making the miserable gay loser kid a self insert.

kind of wish we'd have had the time to read this in school bc there are so many interesting angles you could take with this one. unfortunately i am an adult with a job and other annoying responsibilities so i have neither the time nor the brainspace to work thru all my mixed feelings abt this essay style but let it be known that i would if i was 16 and trying to impress a german teacher who obviously had no patience for me.

now why did i have mixed feelings on this? first of all i thought it was extremely boring in the beginning. was fr starting to panic like wdym there are 800 pages of THIS. and then i kind of stockholm syndromed myself into getting really into it for some reason i can't quite articulate. thomas mann writes with a kind of ironic distance from the characters and the narrative that is very reminiscent of theodor fontane - i am lame enough to have briefly looked into literary criticism on this and felt very vindicated to find out that other people have written about this, and someone used the phrase "wohlwollende ironie des geltenlassens" to describe both and idk if i've read anything more accurate.

now this ironic distance the author affects quite deliberately does make it hard to find an emotional connection the story at first - hence my boredom in the beginning. you're just reading about people having dinner thinking like..... ok who cares? but the more i kept reading, the more i found myself connecting to the story, and i think it's mostly because it started feeling.... familiar? this book is very obviously a fictionalized version of thomas mann's own family and therefore also of his hometown (to the point that people got mad at him about being portrayed in an unflattering way in this book. LOL). while this book is 100+ years old and set even further in the past, the characters are in a wildly different tax bracket than i am, being from a similar hanseatic town in northern germany there was just something about the attitudes and the language - side note: i can NOT imagine ever reading this in translation bc how would you even handle the passages in low german? - that felt extremely familiar to me in a way that i thoroughly enjoyed. this is not so much about any specific character trait or anything, because the characters that embodied this the most to me - the old consul, tony and thomas buddenbrook - don't necessarily share one distinct trait that i could pinpoint this to. that said, it IS obvious that the eponymous decline of the family accelerates the more removed from what are traditionally considered to be the hanseatic virtues (pragmatic protestantism, efficiency, hard work, seriousness, etc) they become. there is a rather obvious tension between leading a "good, normal life" and being in any way, shape or form artistic; kind of a classic topic of german fin de siecle literature.

now i don't have anything per se against this topic, or else i wouldn't have picked up a massive novel that advertises very obviously that it is about decadence and the gradual decline of a family as each generation turns out to be just slightly more..... weak than the one before, in one way or another. the economic downturn of the family is portrayed as a direct result of the individual family members becoming just a little too self-involved, more self-conscious, too focused on invidual fancies and not concerned enough with business and work. not being interested in taking over the family is kind of the ultimate deficit of character here, and it goes very unpleasantly in hand with physical deline as well in this book. the grandfather, the first generation of buddenbrook patriarch we encounter, lives to be an old man and almost a millionaire, and with each generation they lose both money and vitality, until the final two buddenbrook men end up 1. constantly sick and eventually dead at barely sixteen and 2. shoved in an asylum. is there an interesting story here? well yes. of course!! but honestly knowing what comes after in the grand scheme of history, specifically german history, i did find it deeply, deeply unpleasant and unsettling to read about how intellectual and artistic pursuits are not just inherently inferior to the good hard work of an honest merchant, they're also the sign of a diseased body and mind - they're abnormal. in fact, thomas mann himself in his Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (which are, unsurprisingly, not at all unpolitical and to his credit, thomas mann certainly did not hold this work in high regard later in his life) uses an incredibly loaded word to describe hanno buddenbrook: entartet. this word obviously did not quite carry the connotation it does now when he used it, and thomas mann of all people was certainly NOT a nazi, but that only serves to remind you that the heinous ideologies the nazis propagated did not exist in a vacuum - they were based on ideas that other people shared, that were oftentimes quite widespread. this is not really a surprise, considering that they grew out of the same society that thomas mann and his works grew out of; and thomas mann also drew a lot of inspiration from figures whose works certainly had an influence on parts of nazi ideology (richard wagner and nietzsche in particular). still, i had a hard time divorcing those themes in the novel from the real-world association i had with things that the novel itself predates, and while that was more my fault than thomas manns it did negatively impact my reading experience.

anyway all of this to say. rip christian buddenbrook you would have loved LGFUAD by motion city soundtrack. also reading this book kind of feels like listening to the postal service, especially such great heights. and who could hate something that's like listening to the postal service? for now settling on 3.5 stars because i did kind of become obsessed with this the more i read. will be thinking about the sibling relationship between tony, tom and christian for a while to come probably.

jim started reading 'Bruce Springsteen - Like a Killer in the Sun: Songtexte'

Sat, 31 May 2025 07:05:12 -0700

jim started reading Bruce Springsteen - Like a Killer in the Sun: Songtexte by Leonardo Colombati

jim is finished with Buddenbrooks

Sat, 31 May 2025 06:36:53 -0700

jim is finished with Buddenbrooks.
jim wrote: tony buddenbrook is kinda like a horror movie final girl. to ME

jim finished reading 'Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie'

Sat, 31 May 2025 06:36:53 -0700

jim finished reading Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie by Thomas Mann

jim liked a review

Sat, 31 May 2025 03:37:36 -0700

jim liked Pooja's review of Gifted & Talented:

"oh my god what the fuck did i put myself through."

jim liked a readstatus

Thu, 22 May 2025 11:48:48 -0700

jim liked Eve’s status update

Eve started reading The Ministry of Time

jim is currently reading 'Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie'

Wed, 14 May 2025 10:43:42 -0700

jim is currently reading Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie by Thomas Mann

jim added 'A Gorgeous Excitement'

Tue, 13 May 2025 09:28:34 -0700

jim gave 4 stars to A Gorgeous Excitement (Kindle Edition) by Cynthia Weiner
bookshelves: 4-star
WHEW okay. good thing i didn't read the author's note at the beginning bc if i had, i might not have read this book, which would have sucked because i actually really liked this a lot. inching towards 4.5 stars a lot i'd say. but the author's note in the beginning reveals that this is based on a real life murder and i prefer to stay away from anything true crime related. however, the author also says that she KNEW the murderer (which is. insane honestly) so maybe i'd have given her some grace because she's clearly working through some things in this book.

that said, this was an extremely engaging read, i couldn't put it down. the main character nina, self-insert or not, is a great character and the side characters feel pretty true to life as well. i also liked what the author did with her mother's mental illness and how she portrayed the rampant casual sexism. the real star of the book is the hazy, feverish atmosphere of a summer in 1986 new york city though and while i obviously wasn't there, this book made me wish that i had without glamorizing too much. nobody who has seen gossip girl will be shocked by upper east side teenagers doing drugs and hanging out in bars (or committing crimes), but i will say that this book felt a lot more grounded in reality than that show, even in its more unhinged moments. it also captured the particular teenage feeling of feeling like you're always on the outside pretty well. i think more people should be talking about this one tbh, i was a big fan.

(also, i realized after reading the author's note that the events that inspired this book are also the inspiration behind jenny was a friend of mine, which is one of the best songs by the killers, and honestly in a way it has a similar feel to it as this book does, an intriuging mixture of shine and grime)

jim liked a review

Tue, 13 May 2025 09:23:51 -0700

jim liked Kevin Berk's review of The Ministry of Time: