Behind the Lines

Okay, so there's nothing much to write about lately, so I thought I'd give you all an idea of just how lonely and bored a guy can get when he's in a country where he doesn't know the language and he can count the number of callable friends he has on his two hands. I present to you:

THE LIST OF BOOKS THAT I'VE READ WHILE IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC
(in no particular order)

1. Don Quixote - Cervantes
2. Northern Lights - Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials Trilogy, Book 1)
3. The Subtle Knife - Philip Pullman (HDM Trilogy, Book 2)
4. The Amber Spyglass - Philip Pullman (HDM Trilogy, Book 3)
5. The Gambler - Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. How to Be a Canadian (even if you already are one) - Will and Ian Ferguson
7. The Cider House Rules - John Irving
8. The World According to Garp - John Irving
9. Life of Pi - Yann Martell (my favourite book ever by a Canadian writer)
10. East of Eden - John Steinbeck (I read this one in three days when I was sick--great book!)
11. Lord Jim - Josef Conrad (only the first half--it was so bad that I had to quit)
12. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
13. Fifth Business - Robertson Davies (Deptford Trilogy, Book 1)
14. The Manticore - Robertson Davies (Deptford Trilogy, Book 2)
15. World of Wonders - Robertson Davies (Deptford Trilogy, Book 3)
16. The Outline of History, Volume I - H. G. Wells (Volume II, here I come!)
17. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
18. Angels and Demons - Dan Brown
19. The Va Dinci Cod - A. R. R. R. Roberts (it's a parody. I bought it because it looked funny. It wasn't)
20. I Served the King of England - Bohumil Hrabal (Czech writer)
21. Closely Observed Trains - Bohumil Hrabal
22. Immortality - Milan Kundera (Czech writer)
23. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
24. Identity - Milan Kundera
25. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
26. Love All the People - Bill Hicks (he's a now deceased American comedian)
27. Stupid White Men - Michael Moore
28. Czechs in a Nutshell - ?? (a small introduction to Czech life and culture)
29. The Spirit of Prague - Ivan Klima (Czech writer. This is a collection of his essays)
30. May - Karel Hynek Macha (Czech writer. This is the most famous Czech poem from the Romantic Era)
31. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
32. The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
33. A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
34. Letters to Olga - Vaclav Havel (Czech writer, and former President. These are his letters to his wife written from prison during communism)
35. Beethoven's Hair - Russell Martin (in progress)

There is no rhyme or reason to these books. There's some literary classics, some schlock, some humour, some history, some politics, etc. When you live in a foreign country, you'll read just about anything in your native language that you can get your mitts on. However, it's been a great benefit to me to be in the Czech Republic and to have discovered such a vast and rich literary tradition. My favourite of these newly discovered writers is Hrabal, but all of them are good in their own way. Kundera is probably the most famous Czech writer worldwide (aside from Franz Kafka, but he wrote in German) and I think he's easy to find in bookstores in Canada too. For those who are interested in reading any Kundera, I suggest you start with Immortality -- it was my favourite of his books that I read.

My god I belong in publishing.