Day 9/30: Speed Read A Death in Venice by Thomas Mann – 92 Pages in 52 Minutes
This is day #9 of the One Book, One Day challenge. We’re going to speed read A Death in Venice by Thomas Mann at 500 words per minute (WPM) using AccelaReader.com.
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About the Book:
The plot of A Death in Venice presents a great writer suffering writer’s block who visits Venice and is liberated and uplifted, then increasingly obsessed, by the sight of a stunningly beautiful youth. Though he never speaks to the boy, much less touches him, the writer finds himself drawn deep into ruinous inward passion; meanwhile Venice, and finally the writer himself, succumb to a cholera plague. The novella is powerfully intertextual, with the chief sources being first the connection of erotic love to philosophical wisdom traced in Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, and second the Nietzschean contrast between the god of restraint and shaping form, Apollo, and the god of excess and passion, Dionysus. The boy in the story (Tadzio) is based on a boy (Władzio or Adzio, nicknames for the Polish name Władyslaw or Tadeusz respectively) Mann had seen during a visit to Venice in 1911.
See previous books in the 30-day Challenge
Here are the most common words in the book…
Book Stats:
Pages: 92
How Long To Read: 52 minutes (at 500 WPM)
Published: 1912
More Resources:
Paul Nowak
Paul is the founder of Iris Reading, the largest provider of speed-reading and memory courses. His workshops have been taught to thousands of students and professionals worldwide at institutions that include: NASA, Google, HSBC and many Fortune 500 companies.
Comments
Jake Rothman
That one was very strange and unpleasant.