Welcome, to the home page of Marko Štajgár

Playing, reading, and writing are concepts that I somewhat hold sacred. Literature, for me, is not strictly about writings or books. I consider the written word to be just a medium, it is about self-expression of thought.

That’s why I personally consider things like indie games to be classified as pieces of literature. Of course, some of you will disagree, but that is entirely fine and within your liberty. I just want you to be open, and if you have some time to spare, go and please explore some of the beautiful worlds created by the gaming culture, like Hollow Knight or the Dark Souls series that I hold very dear to my heart. The thing is, even though I love Dark Souls, I have never actually played all of them, but what I have done is carefully study the lore of each and every one of them. I simply love great story-telling in any shape or form.

And then there is always the philosophical side of things. I find it incredible that I can directly “hear” and try to comprehend the inner thoughts of great men like Marcus Aurelius and Plato. And when great storytelling and deep philosophy combine, you get what I consider to be some of the greatest products of the human minds known to man. Two of such examples would certainly be my beloved Eä and Dune.

I started my journey as a reader very late in my teenage life, mainly because I consider the literature of my home country to be some of the most misguided and unimaginatory works ever praised on a national level. The elementary education (at least the one I had to go through) was terrible, so younger me didn’t have much motivation or guidance and just stuck to playing games all day. The other thing is that I never really liked the translations of pretty much all the books that I wanted to read in my home country. So I needed to learn English pretty well if I wanted to give it a shot.

In some sense, maybe one can find a positive in starting late. When I was young, I was always looking out just for the story and sometimes completely ingoring the deep meanings of the thoughts that the authors were trying to share with me.

I have three literary universes that always come to mind when I am presented with this question:

1. The enormous legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien
   • I know the lore very well, but up to this date, I have only read a fraction of the books. It is certainly a lifelong goal for me to try to finish them all.
   • His universe just makes sense for me in a way where, in spite of being epic, it is also believable.
     • And I also find Tom Bombadil very interesting.
2. Frank Herbert’s Dune
   • The philosophy in this one goes deep, and it integrates perfectly with the story of a giant, brilliant universe.
3. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes
   • For me Sherlock and Watson are propably out of all the books my favourite characters so far.
   • The Hound of the Baskervilles was especially brilliant.

Literary Works that I consider to be ingenius but inherently philosophical, thus I recommend them in their own category:

1. Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
   • Every time I read through it, the book changes completely in a way that I have never experienced before with any other form of literature.
   • “Achilles and the Tortoise” is some of the most creative concept-explaining technique that I have ever had the privilege to experience.
2. Works of Friedrich Nietzsche
   • To this day, his works are barely comprehensible to my mind, and I do not expect that in my lifetime I will ever fully “get them”.
   • Absolute intelectual titan.
3. Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
   • It is the story within the story, that, at the end, raised the most questions.

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These are the contents of my personal library, if you have any recomendations or suggestions, please let me know :)

A lot of these books I haven’t read all the way through, especially the ones scientific in nature. Keep in mind that some books are simply not meant to be read linearly.

Sorting order: alphabetically by the author

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