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Do you enjoy reading literature?

5 years ago
Most people who teach languages here say they love languages and they enjoy teaching English (or whatever language they teach). Many students, too, claim to be passionate about languages.
And yet, puzzling as it might seem, hardly anybody discusses literature here.

Do you feel shy when it comes to talking about literature?

Have you ever felt so moved by a book that you wanted to read more and more by that specific author?

To me, this expresses better than my own words might, what literature can do to you:

“Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark—readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.” ― A.S. Byatt, Possession

What about yourself?

Literature, anybody?