Download July @ReadNobels Wallpaper featuring #ThomasMann's The Magic Mountain

  • Saturday, July 2, 2016


Cross-posted on Guiltless Reading.

Happy July! Calendar time! If this is the first time you're hearing about this, these calendar wallpapers are a fun monthly project I cooked up for myself and is a sneaky way of promoting the Read the Nobels Reading Challenge for 2016. I select an author who has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, a book cover, and a quote.

About Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize in Literature in1929 "principally for his great novel, Buddenbrooks*, which has won steadily increased recognition as one of the classic works of contemporary literature"(NobelPrize.org).

This prolific German author attracted attention with this win because the Nobel is typically usually awarded for an entire body of work and not just one work. The novel Buddenbrooks,* published in 1901, is a family story inspired by Mann's own background as a north German merchant family.

He is known for his symbolic and ironic fictional works, which have insight into the artistic and intellectual psychology. He drew inspiration from German and Biblical stories, and the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

I am featuring his book The Magic Mountain*, a coming of age story, because I have had it on my TBR for a while now. It has so many quotable quotes that I feel it has much wisdom to impart. Here's a synopsis which I have no doubt will whet your appetite for more Mann:

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

Mann's other notable works include: Death in Venice*, Joseph and His Brothers and Doctor Faustus*.


Have you read any of Mann's work? 


More links about Thomas Mann:

Go ahead and download this month's wallpaper!


Right click image, download, and set as your desktop wallpaper. Voila! #ReadNobels makes an appearance on your computer! (Note: Wallpaper for personal use only.)

* Affiliate links


Author Photo: Carl Van Vechten [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Past wallpapers:
Get some Nobel Prize winning literature in your reading lists! All it takes is one book for the entire year. Click to join the challenge RIGHT HERE!

Read the Nobels 2016

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© Read the NobelsMaira Gall