My favorite, or the one that has stuck in my head and bounced around the most, is The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (pub. 1924). The audiobook version is great!

It is not new to me, I revisited it some this year and started the audiobook with my partner though and the synchronicity with this moment in history is crazy intense especially since Mein Kampf came out within a year or so of it and yet The Magic Mountain is an intensely human experience that revels in imperfectness and sickness as a state of living, illuminating a polar opposite potential in German society than what was allowed to manifest in the following decades or what horror had transpired in the previous decade with WW1.

It wasn't the novel I chose to live rent free in my head, I didn't read it for large portions of the year, but there is no other way to see the future for me other than all of us entering the world Hans Canstorp travels into and through in The Magic Mountain. I think this is in large part because The Magic Mountain was bifurcated by WW1, and the centrist politics of Thomas Mann can be seen evolving throughout the course of the book as Thomas Mann's politics radicalized throughout WW1 and in the wake of it... Thomas Mann began The Magic Mountain before WW1 but put it aside during the war to write more directly about politics and only returned to complete the novel after his worldviews had been thoroughly ground to a powder by the horror of WW1.

No other novel in 2025 gobbled up my reality harder than The Magic Mountain and I suspect 2026 will share a similar vibe.

In 2026 I am looking forward to reading Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann and trying to explore more modernist experimental literature from around the world that often slips by invisible to the "western" literature gaze fixated on white european guys being erudite in crude ways tho I love Pynchon don't get me wrong.

[–] Elextra@literature.cafe 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Sounds amazing. I just added to my TBR pile. Thank you for sharing!

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Note If you read it in English, get the John E. Woods translation not the old Lowe-Porter translation. The Lowe-Porter translation doesn't capture the dry humor of the original German version anywhere as much as it needs to in order for the comic aspects of the novel to levitate. Also... Mann is a stunning writer and the John E. Woods translation leverages ~70 years of engagement with the novel to do the artistry of his writing justice in English.

If you listen to the audiobook by David Rintoul it also uses the John E. Woods translation.