"The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
Mark Twain
Books. It doesn't matter how you read them... old dusty tomes with missing dust jackets, Kindle e-books, tattered garage sale paperbacks or brand new crisp hardbacks straight from the bookstore... books speak to us. I've been a book lover and a writer my entire life, and if you enjoy reading as much as I do, I hope you enjoy the time you spend with this blog. Together I'm sure we'll discover some interesting stories.
‘Altogether,’ Kafka wrote in 1904 to his friend Oskar Pollak, ‘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 on 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, at 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.’ -From The Nightmare of Reason: A
Life of Franz Kafka by Ernst Pawel
