[lit-ideas] Re: Books that bite and sting...
- From: "Julie Krueger" <juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 05:31:38 -0500
"Gravity & Grace", Simone Weil
"The Diving Bell And the Butterfly", Jean-Dominique Bauby
"Holy the Firm", Annie Dillared
"A Whole New Life", Reynolds Price
"Rapture of Canaan", Sheri Reynolds
....come to mind immediately. Where's your list, Ursula?
Julie Krueger
On 6/7/08, Ursula Stange <Ursula@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I'll send you my list if you send me yours...
>
> "Altogether I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us.
> If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the
> skull, why bother reading it in the first place. So that it can make us
> happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books
> at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write
> ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful
> misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love
> ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to
> the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be
> the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe."
> --- Franz Kafka to his friend, Oskar Pollack, 1904
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