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.
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.
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.
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!
