“Constant Readers” Read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain

Write Lin Haire-Sargeant and Robert Gerst:

Above, Lin Haire-Sargeant and Carol McCarthy enjoy a moment with (the spirit of) Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, whose magisterial novel The Magic Mountain the Liberal Arts reading and discussion group Constant Readers have been reading this spring semester. Leon Steinmetz led the Mann discussions.

What’s Constant Readers?

Constant Readers are Mass Art people who gather together to read fiction, poems, and prose for the joy of reading. No oaths of allegiance! No dues! Just people who share a conviction that novelist William Faulkner expresses in his 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The writer’s privilege, Faulkner proclaims, is “to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

In Fall 2018, Debra San led a discussion of sustained contradiction as a literary mode, Robert Gerst led the readers in considering the state of academic freedom in contemporary American higher education, Louise Myers led the readers through  James Joyce’s The Dead, and Paul Bempechat led the readers in considering musical settings of great poems created by great composers.

Starting September 2019, there’ll be more. Lin Haire-Sargeant will be leading the readers into the world of twentieth century novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net and The Sea, The Sea. And then a play by Beckett or Chekhov? A history of the turbulent twentieth century?

Email Lin Haire-Sargeant to join our email list, to hear about dates and times of forthcoming gatherings, to read what we’re reading, to pitch a book or a writer you’d love to talk about with people who love to talk about books.