Reading

I started reading in fifth grade. I was curious but I had no guidance—I didn’t know what to read. I would read encyclopedias, just trying to absorb information about a world I didn’t understand. Why are people doing this or that? What am I supposed to be doing and why? How come everyone seems to know what they should be doing and I didn’t? The books came later. They came without a map, without a syllabus, without anyone telling me what was next. I followed the thread wherever it pulled me.

It started with Jules Verne—in Czech. Patnáctiletý kapitán, Cesta do středu Země, Dvacet tisíc mil pod mořem. Adventure stories that made the world feel vast and knowable at the same time.

Then I transferred to gymnázium, and everything changed. Our history teacher taught the subject the way it should be taught—as a story, not a list of dates. I fell in love with Vojtěch Zamarovský’s Řecký zázrak (The Greek Miracle), a book that told the history of Greece as narrative. I don’t know to what extent Zamarovský was rigorous as a scholar, but it wasn’t fiction either. It was the book that made me want to go to the sources.

So I did. I read Herodotus’ Histories. Then Thucydides—his account of the war between Athens and Sparta, a book that reads like a manual on how civilizations destroy themselves. Then Polybius’ Histories. Then Arrian’s history of Alexander the Great. I was fifteen, reading ancient military campaigns in Czech translation, and I couldn’t stop.

From Greece I moved to Rome—Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War and Commentaries on the Civil War, Zamarovský’s Dějiny psané Římem, Michael Grant’s Dějiny antického Říma in Czech translation, and Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I tried philosophy. I read Plato’s dialogues—most importantly The Republic and The Laws. I never made it through Aristotle. He was too dense for me at the time. I should probably try again.

I also loved Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (Životopisy slavných Řeků a Římanů). Surprisingly readable—I was struck by how accessible some of these ancient authors were. I loved how logical they were, how ambitious, daring, curious. When I saw Plutarch juxtaposing Greeks and Romans—comparing individuals across two different civilizations—I was fascinated. I would never have thought to do that. I was excited to read these stories, though I have to admit: at the time, I wasn’t thinking critically. I was absorbing.

The questions came later, and they were the questions the histories never quite answered. Why could Rome lose three armies to Hannibal and still win the war, while in the late Empire a single defeat against the Parthians meant losing a war? There were vague references to corruption—but what exactly was corruption? Weren’t people about equally greedy in all periods? The same puzzle applied to Byzantium: Justinian’s reconquista under Belisarius—I read Robert Graves’ Count Belisarius—and then centuries of decline, held together by Greek fire and the walls of Constantinople. When Mehmed II finally punched through those walls, I wondered: why didn’t the Byzantines have the same cannons? How did peoples from the steppe overcome a thousand-year-old civilization? How did the Turks succeed where the Arabs had failed? The explicit discussion of class struggle between the populares and optimates in ancient Rome also struck me—that kind of transparent analysis of power wasn’t common in Czech discourse at the time.

Much later—more than twenty years later—I read Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies and encountered his argument that Plato was essentially a proto-fascist. It shocked me. When I had read The Republic and The Laws in high school, I had thought: what nonsense, no state would actually have these rules—children not knowing their parents, all of it. And then Popper opened my eyes to the fact that much of it was modeled on the Spartan social system. It had been real. I had dismissed it as fantasy because I lacked the context to see it as a blueprint.

But it was the Stoics who changed something. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (Hovory k sobě in Czech) and Epictetus’ Enchiridion (Ruko­jeť — Rozpravy). I loved them because I had never had a framework for personal decisions. I didn’t know the word “framework” back then, or the role it plays in rational action, but I had an implicit thirst for one. My mother’s decision process felt arbitrary, and frankly so did everyone else’s. People didn’t need good reasons for what they did. They seemed inconsistent, acting on impulse, whim, performance. Stoicism gave me a north star. But more than that, it told me that people had been thinking deeply about why they do what they do—two thousand years ago—even if the living people around me didn’t seem to. Everyone kept telling me I was overthinking everything. To me it felt more like they were underthinking everything.

With the Stoics, unlike the histories, there was a feedback loop between theory and practice. I could apply what I read to real decisions, run into problems, think about those problems, and when I couldn’t figure it out, go back to the text. The historical reading was absorption. The philosophical reading was conversation.

Parallel to the ancient world, there was another education happening. I would go to the National Technical Library—then housed near Klementinum in the center of Prague—and read PC Magazine and Chip, the two most important technology magazines available in Czech. I read about HTML, PHP, CSS. I tried to learn C, C++, Java, but at the time I didn’t understand what they were for. I had no guidance. Our computer science class in gymnázium barely covered MS Word and Excel.

Still, I felt privileged. These libraries gave me access that I considered the highest privilege possible. This was before Google. AltaVista and Yahoo were the maps of the internet. I didn’t have internet at home, so I would go to the library and reserve time by the hour—one hour per week was the limit. If the slots were full, I would put myself on the backup list and sit around waiting. I set up my first email on post.cz and had no idea what it was for. No one I knew had email. I got some friends to set up accounts and we started sending each other messages, marveling at the fact that it worked at all.

Around the same time, I fell in love with Linux. I read Mark G. Sobell’s Linux — Praktický průvodce, Linux in a Nutshell by Andy Oram and Ellen Siever, the Linux Documentation Project book, Linux — Začínáme programovat (a translation of Neil Matthew and Richard Stones), and Správa operačního systému Linux by Roderick W. Smith and Vicki Stanfield. I would try to install SuSE Linux on our family computer, which drove my brother crazy—I couldn’t get half the hardware working, and he needed Windows for gaming and Office. The CD burner wouldn’t work under SuSE. Dual boot was a constant negotiation.

But everything about Linux was a revelation. So many choices to make—KDE vs. GNOME (I loved GNOME), so many text editors (I eventually learned Vim, which became my go-to for coding), so many shells (bash, zsh). I tried RedHat, Mandrake, even Slackware. I tried Wine for gaming with no success—all that OpenGL graphics card configuration. One really had to understand computers to set up a Linux system. Windows hid all that complexity. Linux opened it up. It introduced me to problems and choices I didn’t know existed, and in doing so it taught me how computers actually work. I loved the open source spirit and ideology—the idea that knowledge should be shared, that tools should be free, that a community of strangers could build something better than a corporation. Today I mostly use Ubuntu, and I am grateful that macOS is built on UNIX—I get the terminal I love inside an ecosystem that connects everything else.

By the time I got to college, everything had changed. A friend started a school magazine and I designed the website for it—a content management system in PHP and MySQL where articles were stored and retrieved dynamically. I also built the school’s official website. The kid who had been reading PC Magazine at the library was now building the things he had read about.

The ancient world kept pulling me forward. Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars—biographies written with the sensibility of a gossip columnist and the access of an archivist. Titus Livius and his history of Rome, a source you learn to read with one eyebrow raised. Ammianus Marcellinus. A book about Attila. Dějiny Byzance from Academia. A book about Eugène of Savoy. Napoleon byl zavražděn—the case that Napoleon was slowly poisoned on Saint Helena.

In Czech literature, I loved Zikmund Winter’s Mistr Kampanus—a novel set in Prague during the Thirty Years’ War that captures the impossible choices of living under occupation. It stayed with me.

I read most of Paulo Coelho’s books—all except the last three or so. He started repeating himself, and once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. But the early ones mattered at the time.

Balzac’s short stories—we had a Czech edition at home called Povídky, a collection that included the story of Gobseck, the moneylender. Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov—I read it and then saw it performed in theater. Some books are complete on the page. That one needed a stage.

And then Ludwig von Mises’ Liberalismus, in Czech translation. I was so taken with it that I gave a presentation on liberalism to my class. That was probably the first time I stood in front of a room and argued for an idea. It would not be the last.

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man arrived somewhere in this period—a book that felt like it explained the world I had grown up in, the post-1989 optimism, the sense that something had been settled.

When I got to college, I didn’t have time for books anymore. The classes were engrossing enough. But in one of them we were assigned F. A. Hayek’s The Use of Knowledge in Society, published in the American Economic Review, and something shifted.

I loved the font of the AER. It felt so serious, so grave—almost like being in a church. I was privy to printed word that distilled so much knowledge into so short a piece of writing. I felt like I needed to scrutinize every sentence, that every sentence carried deep meaning. It felt like holding a religious relic. And I loved the content too. I loved what it represented. While many people were busy discussing what is fair and what is not, here was Hayek in the 1940s asking whether this or that was even feasible. Twenty years later, reading Stephen Kotkin’s biography of Stalin, I would learn that the Soviets effectively realized their ideas were impractical before Lenin even died. The New Economic Policy was an admission that they had no economic programme at all. But I only connected those dots in 2024.

I was also learning English with more intensity than ever before. I had paper flashcards—experimenting with individual words on each card versus whole sentences for context. I watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s more than twenty times. Training Day with Denzel Washington around five. This was before streaming, before Napster. I was reading The Economist cover to cover, learning the language of argument and evidence at the same time. My programme required two foreign languages, so I picked up Italian too. The reading never stopped—it just changed medium.

A confession: given everything I’ve read and everything I try to absorb, and given that it is not possible for me to read everything before I die—not everything worth reading, not even everything I know I would consider worth reading—I should admit that I only watched Hunter × Hunter and Hikaru no Go. I didn’t read them. Still, I want to pause and say what makes them extraordinary.

Hunter × Hunter is infectiously optimistic. I intuitively loved that quality and only later understood why, when I read Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness and Flourish. The main character, Gon, starts as a blank slate of sorts—a kid who grew up in the countryside, running around with not overly restrictive oversight from his aunt, understanding nature more than people. His father left him. But Gon wasn’t angry about it, the way everyone would be. And he didn’t let it defeat him. There is a line—I think from a Woody Harrelson film—that every challenge either defines you, strengthens you, or defeats you. Gon let it do the first two, in the most positive way possible. He set out to be worthy. Not to prove something to his father. To become the best version of himself.

And that is something I have always intuitively felt was my goal. I want to be the best person I can be. I want to grab from life as much as I can. It’s not moral superiority. It’s greed. I love life and I want the most of it. But I don’t want to have things so much as be things. That’s the object of my greed. I want to know things, learn things, try things, taste things, consider things, do things, analyze things. I want to grab life and absorb it with maximum fullness. I am haunted by the possibility that I would leave something on the table—that there are great people I wouldn’t meet, great things I wouldn’t do, great books I wouldn’t read before I die. It gives me a sense of urgency. Impatience.

Hikaru no Go introduced me to the Japanese game of Go and to the idea that mastery is a lifelong pursuit with no ceiling. It captures something rare: the emotional texture of getting better at something difficult, the loneliness of improvement, and the quiet joy of understanding a position that was opaque to you a year ago.

Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking changed how I think about the kitchen—not as a place of recipes but as a laboratory of chemical reactions. Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab took that scientific mindset and made it practical. Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat gave me the framework: four variables that explain almost everything.

Giulia Enders’ Gut started me down the fermentation path. William Davis’s Super Gut and the Sonnenburgs’ The Good Gut deepened it. Sandor Katz’s The Art of Fermentation is the bible. Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast taught me that the best bread requires the least intervention—just time and attention.

Marion Nestle’s Food Politics and What to Eat, and Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, gave me the systems view: food is not just chemistry, it is policy, economics, and power.

Christopher Clarey’s The Master is the definitive portrait of Roger Federer—not just as a player but as a mind. Rafael Nadal’s Rafa is the other side: what it takes to compete when you believe the other person is more talented than you. Between the two books, you get the full spectrum of what elite performance looks like.

This page will grow. I am always reading something.