Ah, I'm of two minds about this, because I felt like there maybe 30-50 pages of amazing, incredibly deep discussions, but then so many hundreds of pages where it felt like nothing was going on and I was just masochistically slogging through it. I actually feel this about quite a number of classics, especially those considered more "novels of ideas" (The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace come to mind). But even more so with Magic Mountain. I think Mann was trolling people when he said one has to read it a second time to "get" it. ;)
