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What are you reading? In an effort to improve my German, I'm reading Zweig's 'Die Welt von Gestern', The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European. I rarely read non-fiction, but this book, which is a kind of autobiography but is really a deeply melancholy memory of the collapse of the European civilization that preceded the first world war and its aftermath, is extraordinary. If you have any interest in what Europe was like at the end of the 'long 19th century', in the belle epoque that preceded 1914, you must read it.
Zweig began his life in 1882 as a bourgeois Austrian Jew whose father had made a fortune in textiles. He became one of the most widely-translated authors of the early 20th century. He submitted the draft of this book on the eve of his suicide, in exile in Brazil, some sixty years later, when the second world war seemed like the final end, the stamping out, of the German civilization he had cherished and to which he was devoted.
The book covers the rapid and interesting developments in wealthy Austrian society in the closing decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th. Zweig was well-connected; he meets Herzl as his literary editor at a newspaper, encounters Rathenau in 1922 on the eve of his assassination, petitions (successfully!) Mussolini to spare the life of a close Italian friend. He travels to America and India, but he spends most of his time in the bourgois, cosmopolitan circles of pre- and inter-war Europe, describing extensively the customs, sexual morality, education, worldview and politics of many of the people(s) he meets.
His writing about the rise of Hitler is interesting, how he was largely written off by many people in cultured Viennese circles. And his thoughts on what caused the frantic, bizarre culture deterioriation and degeneracy of postwar urban Germany and Austria, particularly after 1922, have value too. But what sticks with me is something else; Zweig killed himself out of despair (he had money and was famous and safe in exile) for Europe. For the last thirty years of his life he had seen the world he knew get worse, again and again, consistently and almost without respite. He writes about how the quality of products declined, how the train schedules worsened, the quality of everything reduces. How the masses were whipped up into rage. And then you return to the exquisite summer of 1914, where it seemed as if all of that - the nightmare of the following decades - was impossible, because things had been improving for so long.
When I looked up modern Anglophone writing about Zweig I was saddened that there had been some pathetic articles published during the Trump presidency that took his writing about fascism out of context. Zweig was largely apolitical - about politics as diverse as zionism, socialism and fascism - and Hitler himself praised and attended the performance of one of his operas in 1935. The value in his narrative is not about politics, it is about how faint the possibility of the loss of peace and prosperity can seem before it happens, how fragile civilization is, how savage war makes men, how it empties culture, and how things can really get worse, much worse, for a very very long time before they get better.
I always see these reading threads and think y'all read such heavy stuff. I read for fun. Not a serious book in sight.
I just caught up in Markets and Multiverses. A young lady dies. Her soul gets pulled along in a big soul ocean to a galaxy sized ship floating in the soul ocean. The ship is called "the market". Its a place for re-incarnators to stop by and buy powers between reincarnations. But the ship has been taken over and all the reincarnators seem to have been killed, and the enemies are still lurking around. She meets some new people from different worlds who also just got reincarnated. Together they Reincarnate and try to build up their powers.
I'm currently subscribed to patreons for some stories I enjoy. Like Millennial Mage (A Slice of Life, Progression Fantasy) and The Path of Ascension. I recently got to read the end of Ar'Kendrithyst which is one of the longest completed stories ever at 4.39 million words. I'm also caught up on The Stubborn Skill-Grinder In A Time Loop which is the perfect level of trashy dumb progression fantasy for me. I'm waiting for Chaotic Craftsman Worships The Cube and Unintended Cultivator - A Xianxia-inspired Cultivation Novel to build up more of a chapter backlog for me to start reading them again.
I like action, powerful main characters that kick ass, and fantasy worlds that mostly don't resemble our world at all. I prefer stories with low levels of moral ambiguity. Made up fantasy systems and rules are fun. Betrayal is not fun. Horrors of war are not fun. Politics is boring.
I'll recommend Dungeon Diver: Stealing A Monster’s Power. It thoroughly earns its 3.5 star rating with its characterization, plot, and prose, but man was it fun.
A few underappreciated positives of stories I'm reading (that wouldn't generally make it into other reviews):
The Calamitous Bob: The world and everything in it is as serious as reality, which makes it an excellent straight man. For example, the first group the main character runs into doesn't have a "V" phoneme in their language, so she becomes known as "Bob". Also, you know the the trope where you can tame a cute animal by acting nonthreatening and giving it food? And animal-like people (eg. cat-people, lizard-people, bird-people)? Well,some platypus-people tried to tame the main character with dumplings.
Markets and Multiverses: Death isn't final, so the stakes are higher. If the protagonists got into an unwinnable fight in any other story, I'd know they would survive (because otherwise the story ends). However, the worst-case scenario of having to reincarnate doesn't end the story, so it's a possibility: they lost plot-armor in exact proportion to their immortality.
Player Manager: It's set very much in present day London. In-story, it's mid-April 2024, and the earlier chapters included the Queen's death and its effects on English sports. It lends a certain amount of grounding to the story.
Dungeon Diver: Stealing A Monster’s Power sounds like my cup of tea.
Calamitous Bob has been sitting in my follow list for a while. I read it a long time ago up to about chapter 100. It has an amazing army fight scene.
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