Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

Mysteries were her candy, her vodka tonic, her bubble bath.

I read for the same reasons I’ve always done it, for pleasure and escape. But now I was also reading to forget—for just a half hour or so—the reality of what my sister was going through.

read for the same reasons I’ve always done it, for pleasure and escape. But now I was also reading to forget—for just a half hour or so—the reality of what my sister was going through.

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 being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.
—FRANZ KAFKA, letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27, 1904