Pulling Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain off the shelf
My father-in-law — a warm, funny, and brilliant man of idiosyncratic passions, the only person I know who’s read Twain’s Is Shakespeare Dead? and enjoys it as much as I do — was diagnosed with multiple myeloma last fall. It’s a terrible disease (and rare, except for those who, like him, were exposed to Agent Orange), but treatments have improved . . .