What time did I wake up this morning?
I woke up at 4:26 am today. It is a shitty time to wake up, IMNSHO. I am playing single mom for the week, this should be very interesting!
Now, lets chat a bit about that Kafka quote. I know someone who is a shockingly snobbish book snob. I talked them into reading a YA book that I loved, and that I thought they might enjoy. They claimed to like enough, but proceeded to make fun of me and my love of what we now call YA literature. It is a delightful story.
Anyway, the snobby book-snob friend treats books like that… like they need to impale you in some way.
I love those books too, but I also love stories. Beautiful, gentle stories that are really nothing for that frozen sea within us, but which can provide a momentary escape with out the hard edge of an axe… well, that can be just as impactful if you let it. These stories, they don’t come under the guise of authors like Joseph Conrad, they can be found amid the pulp fiction novels of the modern era.
“If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the head, why bother reading it in the first place?…. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” — Franz Kafka in a letter to Oskar Pollak dated January 27, 1904
~ Franz Kafka
