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154 More forest. “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? . . . But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves , like a being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide.”73 73 Franz Kafka to Oskar Pollak, January 27, 1904, in Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1977), 16. ...

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