MONTHLY READS - OCTOBER

Hi bookworms! October is Octover so I have another monthly reads for you!

I'm sorry for the lack of posts in the past two months, I really am. The thing is, my phone broke down at the end of August and it's still not repaired, and I don't really feel like making posts without photographs in them. Hopefully the phone will be back in no time now.

Let's have a look at how I managed with my reading in October. Just because I'm not reviewing doesn't mean I'm not reading, even though my September monthly reads post might have made you think otherwise. Let's have a look at what I read this month!

In October aka Halloween month I managed to read five books. That's way better than last month! So, without further ado, let's have a look at them.

Má Bohéma

Arthur Rimbaud

Genre: poetry

First published: —

Pages: 200

Language: Czech

Type: Hardback

Rating: 5/5

As you can probably say by now, I'm very fond of poetry — and Rimbaud is hands down one of my most favourite poets. Reading his poems when the cover looks the way it does was absolutely dreamy. I enjoyed it very much. I liked Vítězslav Nezval's translation and I'm definitely planning on getting this little book in English, too.


Květy Zla
Charles Baudelaire

Genre: poetry
First published: 1857
Pages: 184
Language: Czech
Type: hardback

Rating: 5/5

I couldn't possibly read Rimbaud's poems without reading the poems of a person he considered to be something like a god, could I? Baudelaire has his rightful place in my heart. Again, this books was translated by Vítězslav Nezval and he did a really good job. Again, look at the beautiful cover art. I'm crying at how beautiful it is. Two of my most favourite things — art and poetry — collided and made something beyond perfect. And again, I'm planning on getting this book in English as well.


Král Lávra
Karel Havlíček Borovský

Genre: poetry
First published: 1870
Pages: 38
Language: CzechType: e-book

Rating: 2/5

What can I say. It's a Czech classic and I only read it because it's short and it's for school. It's accompanied by a few drawings that made it more exciting to read, but in overall it was the average for me. Two out of five stars.



Romeo and Juliet | Romeo a Julie
William Shakespeare

Genre: tragedy
First published: 1595
Pages: 203
Language: Czech / English
Type: hardback

Rating: 4/5

I absolutely loved this. I saw a really great version of the play earlier this year (at the start of September) and I simply adored it. It was funny, sad, all that it should be. I read it for school, yes, but it's one of the school readings that I do not mind at all and that I will love getting back to. If you haven't read Shakespeare, do yourself a favour and do it. Just for the sake of the humour in that.


Carry On
Rainbow Rowell

Genre: YA, fantasy

First published: 2015

Pages: 521

Language: English

Type: paperback

Rating: 5/5

Finally. Finally a book that helped me out of my misery, out of my reading slump. Baz and Simon are exactly what I needed. This whole book is exactly what I needed. Lesbian pixies, gay vampires, bisexual mages. It was something totally different than I expected from Rainbow after my last experience with her book, but this just entirely overcame my expectations. I absolutely loved it and I highly recommend this book to all fans of YA novels with ships that have the power to end you. And also to all those who are not really huge YA fans, you will be after reading this, trust me. A more detailed review is to come, so stay tuned!

What about your October? How was it? Any tips for great books or warnings about books we shouldn't even put our hands on? 

TIME TO TALK | My prejudices against Czech authors

Hello and welcome to a new category where I'm going to talk about anything book-related when I feel like sharing my opinions (which is pretty often). In today's "episode" of Time To Talk I'm going to tell you something about my prejudices against Czech authors.

As a person born and raised in a really small country in the middle of Europe, I’ve never really been proud of my ancestry, I’ve never been what you would call a patriot. I’ve never felt there was anything to be proud of about being Czech. Maybe it was because the world sees our country as something really insignificant, even though there are many things we as a nation had accomplished. (Like seriously, we've done some good stuff. Read about a few of our inventors or a few quite impressive Czech people.) I’ve just always felt kind of invisible in this America-centered world and I found myself being kind of under the pressure of keeping up with the goings-on in the world rather than with the goings-on in my own country. I just thought that things concerning this little place on Earth weren’t as important or as interesting.

In all my life, I’ve always had this problem with reading books by Czech authors. If I were to choose between a book by a Czech author and an American author, I’d never even think about taking the former. I would immediately reject it without even looking at it. It was simply because I thought Czech books weren’t important and interesting because nobody outside of our borders ever reads them, right? Nobody knows about our authors, they barely know we’re not Czechoslovakia anymore. So I thought, why would I waste my time with reading books nobody cares about when there are all these great and awesome foreign books coming out every single day?

I kinda blame the booklr and book-blogging community for this mindset of mine. Seeing all the new and exciting books everyone talks about all the time and never seeing a single Czech one really makes you question laying your hands on Czech books. There's this kind of pressure to keep up with the Cool Guys on the Internet who read all the Cool Books and write about them — so you don't really consider reading books that they don't even know about existing. And that's really toxic. You're missing out on great books that don't have this super-duper hype about them. That's the case of many Czech books.

The fact that the books they tell you about in school are just the old ones written in a language that’s hard to understand for a twelve-year-old doesn’t really add up to this. The twelve years old me simply wasn’t interested in Božena Němcová and Karel Čapek. I simply believe that books have their right timing in our lives and these books just found me in the worst time possible. I wanted to read new and exciting things, I didn’t want to worry about not understanding a single thing of what I was reading.

Recently, however, the right time has come. I started discovering books written by Czech authors that are just beautiful. Whether it’s the story that makes them beautiful or the usage of language, I realised that there, in fact, are Czech books that are worth reading and worth my time. I discovered Jan Otčenášek, whose Romeo, Juliet and darkness is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read (it’s more the beautiful writing than the story itself), and I discovered Milan Kundera (whose writing is good but I don’t really like him as a person). And I’m really trying to be open and to step out of my comfort zone and discover more and more Czech authors who are actually pretty great and who give me a reason to be proud of my nationality.

The point is, let’s just try and not have prejudices. Let’s try and be open to trying new things and let’s just try stepping out of our comfort zones more often. Because there are good things waiting out there, they just need to be discovered.

What about you? Do you read books written by your "home authors"? And who are some of your favourite non-English authors? Definitely share them with me!