The will to live, the love of life

David Grossman has a very striking piece in the Guardian Review about how he came to write the extraordinary novel See Under: Love. Lots of good things there, but here's a bit that especially struck me:

I know that when I read a good book, I experience internal clarification: my sense of uniqueness as a person grows lucid. The measured, precise voice that reaches me from the outside animates voices within me, some of which may have been mute until this other voice, or this particular book, came and woke them. And even if thousands of people are reading the very same book I am reading at the very same moment, each of us faces it alone. For each of us, the book is a completely different kind of litmus test.