If the book we are reading does not wake us … why then do we read it?
Average Reading Time: less than a minute.
In a 1904 letter to a friend, Franz Kafka asked a provocative rhetorical—and metaphorical—question: “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?” And then he answered the question this way: A book should serve as an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.
