““WE OUGHT TO READ,” stated Franz Kafka in a letter penned to a friend in 1904, only “those books which bite and sting.” If the book that we read doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the skull, why, then, do we read the book? So that it makes us happy, as you write? My God, we would be happy just so, if we had no books, and those books which make us happy we could, in a pinch, write ourselves. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster that hurts us badly, 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. […] A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”