Joseph and his brothers

This remarkable new translation of the Nobel Prize-winner's great masterpiece is a major literary event. Thomas Mann regarded his monumental retelling of the biblical story of Joseph as his magnum opus. He conceived of the four parts-The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, and Joseph the Provider-as a unified narrative, a "mythological novel" of Joseph's fall into slavery and his rise to be lord over Egypt. Deploying lavish, persuasive detail, Mann conjures for us the world of patriarchs and pharaohs, the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, and the universal force of human love in all its beauty, desperation, absurdity, and pain. The result is a brilliant amalgam of humor, emotion, psychological insight, and epic grandeur. Now the award-winning translator John E. Woods gives us a definitive new English version of Joseph and His Brothersthat is worthy of Mann's achievement, revealing the novel's exuberant polyphony of ancient and modern voices, a rich music that is by turns elegant, coarse, and sublime.

What Hacker News says

fromseashoreJan 2023

"Joseph and his brothers" by Thomas Mann.

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pfortunyJul 2022

Thomas Mann’s “Joseph and his brothers”, a tetralogy on the biblical (old testament) Joseph.

I am in the fourth reading.

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swombatDec 2008

EDIT3: If we're going to go with fiction, this looks like a good list to pick from:
http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/6.Best_Books_of_the_20th_...
Personally, I've read almost none of these!

1) How can you have read none of these? Get started already! And don't wait for others to tell you which books to read!

2) That list is very suspect... I don't know how they compiled it, but it's a bit strange that it does contain some good books but then simultaneously allocates several positions to enjoyable but trashy books such as Harry Potter. Also gives several position to LotR (one is warranted, no more!), including one for the Silmarillion (wtf? I enjoyed it, but "best book of the 20th century"? no way!) Memoirs of a Geisha is also nice but hardly a thought leader. And it seems to be completely missing immortal masterpieces such as Narziss & Goldmund (Herman Hesse), Joseph and his Brothers (Thomas Mann), The Trial (Kafka), and many others.

An "OK" starting point, but not even the shadow of a definitive list.

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swombatNov 2008

I'm currently re-reading Joseph and His Brothers, a 1200-page heavy-weight monster of a book by Thomas Mann (himself a heavy-weight monster of an author).

Do I recommend it? Yes, but not for everyone. The preface itself is one of the heaviest essays on theology/philosophy out there, but the whole book is crammed with brilliant ideas/wisdom and is a masterpiece of literature (but it's heavy and the story moves fairly slowly).

Something lighter along those lines would be Narziss & Goldmund, by Herman Hesse - also heavy-weight, contemporary and compatriot to Thomas Mann, but capable of a lighter style!

But yeah, I love to read (and not just German literature... those are just the examples that spring to mind right now out of the countless ocean).

To answer your other questions...

What is your most favourite book and why?

What's your favourite movie? If you read any significant number of books, naming a single favourite is impossible - unthinkable, even.

How many books would you estimate you read a month?

It really depends on the books and the time of my life... sometimes I've finished a book in 3 days, but other times it's taken me months to get through a single book (such as the Thomas Mann brick I'm currently reading).

do you think all this reading is worth it?

I think life would be pointless without it. At the very least, it would reduce my mental freedom to not read books. I made an argument for that on my blog: http://inter-sections.net/2007/12/13/sapir-whorf-books-and-y...

would it not be better if you spent your time doing something else and why?

It really depends on what you're reading. If you spend your time reading Dragonlance novels (I've done that, it's nothing to be ashamed of, so long as it's a phase that passes), then yeah, you could probably do something better with your time. But books are still far and away the deepest and most fruitful repository of human wisdom that we have available to us. Sure, you can learn all you can learn from books, from your own life. But you'd be a fool not to climb on the shoulders of those giants who have come before us if all it takes is a few hours of comfortable, enjoyable time with a good book.

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MichaelMoser123Jul 2020

also keeping grain reserves was probably the killer application of ancient civilizations; (you can also read about that in the Bible - on Joseph and his brothers), being able to weather the occasional famine was probably worth much more than the increased risk of disease in crowded and dirty cities or the cost of bondage/servitude (in these times that is) - alternatively it may be that this perception was a matter of perceived risk vs. known risk; the certain risk of famine had more weight than the uncertain risk of disease and loss of freedom; hard to say.

But these are all speculations.

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