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I don't know that Kafka's quote pertains to all literature and all reading. It might have been true for him on that afternoon, or of his project overall, or expressed the emotional charge which for him threaded necessary words both read and written. That charge might have felt like an antidote for the stately enervated language he felt surrounded him.
Perhaps the goal was to be fully alive, to shatter that "frozen sea."
I myself have never been able to justify my compulsion to read books that raked and shredded me, though to do so always seemed a responsibility, especially in terms of channeling someone else's pain. Films, paintings, plays -- the compulsion is the same. If I'm so close to the subject that I have to suppress the reflex to vomit, then I can maintain the illusion I'm honoring the person who suffered. It doesn't follow that such art is always good or the ritual logical. And yet I've found myself doing it all my life.
To read agonizing books can seem completely unconstructive. You're helping no one, and yet you feel you're inside someone else, bearing witness. Perhaps it has something to do with the dead for me -- the stupid desire to clasp the hands of the hunted and murdered women whose bodies fill the earth. To believe that, if I truly felt what it was like to be them for one lasting moment, I could pull them out of the ground intact, and their skeletons would change into living beings again, and their lives might be better this time, if only I understood them and stepped back and didn't interfere.
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