Currently reading: just checking in edition

Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries
It took almost a year and 1200 pages, but I've finally begun to lose track of the minor characters. There's been a shift for the last 200 pages--no dead characters coming back to talk with the narrator--and so we're left with a teenager's recollections of what 1946 was like. The recollections, like all of ours, are a mix of things she saw and noticed at the time with the addition of things she knows to have been true, and as a result a bit of the focus is lost. The stakes are also unclear: preparing for and surviving war are comprehensible; the outcome of municipal elections do not have as clear stakes. (I think the implication of all this business is that the Soviets are attempting to get the East Germans to do what they want without explicitly instructing them, for the resonances with Prague in '68, but this has not developed yet.)

George Eliot, Middlemarch
The one-chapter-a-day-to-finish-in-three-months system has, as predicted, allowed me to get past secondhand embarrassment at Dorothea's poor decision-making, but it has alas reminded me of all the other young people also making poor decisions. But it's a good reminder that Eliot has the authorial and narrative presence that so many other narrated novels (movies, tv shows) wish they had but do not. If it weren't for the length and density of the books, Eliot would be a perfect author for the stereotypical gen z reader: she will tell you exactly what she thinks about everything.

Heinrich Böll, Collected Stories
The "literature of the rubble" is as advertised, painting what one feels to be a accurate portrait of what it must have been like to live as a former soldier of a defeated and shamed nation, and manages to do so without incurring any sympathy at all for the people who more or less knew what they were doing. The Train Was on Time does what it says on the tin, and while it has a certain thinness, it is a novella, and so effective as long as you're not expecting a novel. But the literature of the rubble gives way to just plain literature, and the success or failure of the stories depends on whether the hook is any good--metier is no help.

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks
Over time, you read enough novels and you can pick up the themes--so this is another multi-generational story of familial decline that is meant to throw light onto Germany's decline as a country and empire. I liked Doktor Faustus but was a bit cooler toward The Magic Mountain, so I guess we'll see.