Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

 So before I read this, I read another, wholly unrelated novel, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, by Carlo Emilio Gadda.  It's considered one of the great Italian novels, or so they say; a sort of existential murder mystery.  I ended up not caring for it that much; you can see what people see in it, but there is just SO MUCH endless digression to god knows what point, that in the end I thought it was just okay.  

But my point is, it's also a very dense novel.  So before I started I thought; self, if you're going to tackle this, you've gotta be disciplined about it.  You  can't just fuck around and take six months to finish it and get little out of it.  So, I was: I read it in a week or so, and I felt quite good about that, because I feel like my literary interest, for whatever reason, was waning a bit; now I feel good about it again.  So anyway, feeling thus refreshed, I decided, what the fuck, I will tackle this German novel that is seventeen hundred seventy-four pages of small, densely-set text.  It's one of those books I knew about and vaguely wanted to have read for quite a while, but after Proust, I wasn't sure I had it in me to tackled another meganovel.  But it turns out I did!  In almost exactly two months.  Boom.

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