The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I don't know how others cope with heavy workloads and heartbreaking realizations, but I like to lounge around the house in my grungy attire and read favourite passages from my favourite books. I do this while drinking a lot of scotch, by the way.

I could go on all day and night about books. I wish I had someone to gush about literary obsessions with. Sadly, I am a lonesome bookworm. A one woman book club.

So, I have a hard time picking favourites, but Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being sticks out because it has truly shaped the person I am today. I've never identified with so many fictional characters in one book before. It just spoke volumes to me as I read it for the first time on a lonely train ride in Prague. I've read it three times now and whenever I need a hit, I flip through my favourite pages (Sometimes I bend the page's corner or I underline words with a pen). I guess in a way, Kundera is my cocaine.

"When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina, what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being."



Does anyone else feel so passionate about a single book or am I just crazy?