Books

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash. This year was the year when I started reading lot of essays. An essay is somewhat neglected writing form - it’s basically thinking laid bare, with an attempt to figure something out. The word essay itself comes from the French essayer which means to try. Now unless you are a philosophy geek, that does not sound terribly interesting. But wait, good essay happens to have one more important feature – it comes up with something surprising. Consequently, it is a (relatively) short form that reveals new ways to understand the world around you. Being a short form, it not only means you don’t have to deal with a whole book (and there is lot of them that waste 300+ pages to get one page worth of a point across), but also that authors who do not write books still can get a shot at expressing their thoughts through essays. ...

Lately, I have been asked about some Czech book recommendations which made me think what to recommend to people interested in the Czech history, culture and mentality. “Luckily” the Czech history is rich with drama and oppression, which gave breeding ground to great storytelling. Unluckily, much of it has not been translated to English. Necessary then, when recommending books to foreigners, I have to limit the recommendation to translations. These were more often than not penned by authors living in exile, which does carry the benefit that these authors were often able to contrast the Czech and foreign experience. ...