I've been meaning to start posting thoughts about books I've read, am reading or would like to read, but I'm far too lazy to get to that any time soon, especially considering I'm at work right now, so for now I'll have to content myself with just mentioning the books and getting around to actually writing about them at some point in the near future.

I'm currently reading War with the newts by Karel Čapek. (I'm actually reading it in Czech, so maybe I should put the title as Válka s mloky.)

I just finished Ordinary lives by Josef Škvorecký and The Lazarus project by Aleksandar Hemon.

Indifference - our mother, our salvation, our destruction

From an interview with Josef Škvorecký:

“Today I’d exclude destruction, and I’m not even sure anymore that indifference is our mother. But it is certainly our saviour.” Why, I asked him, does indifference retain its saving power? “If you were not indifferent, in a certain sense, in the days of Nazism or Communism, you would go mad,” he answered. “Because there were so many victims, you accepted it as a hard fact of life. Nobody weeps reading about six million dead, but if you read the story of one concrete, individual person, you can have a rapport with that person’s suffering. The greatness of literature is that it can move you that way.”

I just had a look at my friend J.'s blog (that his form of anonymous friend-mention, which is also suitable for my purposes) for the first time in a while. He has some entertaining, but some interesting and admirable new year's resolutions, one of which is to write more. I really want to make more of an effort to write as well, especially on my blog. I find myself with thoughts that I understand about how I see the world, but when it comes to verbalizing them in conversation they tends to come out as mumbled garbage, something along the lines of "I like boobies" (a profound and important thought but which could be certainly expanded upon and clarified). Writing forces you to organize thoughts into words that are going to sit on the screen in front of you instead of just floating as vague clouds of words that can't be expressed to another person but make sense inside the limited confines of my brain. When it comes to actually putting words onto, er, paper, I always get the feeling that my grasp of the language isn't as good as I pretend or think it is, so I should really work on that. I just wish my computer was in a more comfortable place in the house...