The best known books set in each country: Czechia / The Czech Republic

See here for methodology, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the Czech Republic.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

I had expected a lot of confusion with Slovakia here, but in fact most people are pretty clear on whether a book is set in the one country or the other.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Metamorphosis	Franz Kafka	1,445,797	30,000+	128,460
The Unbearable Lightness of Being	Milan Kundera	547,805	24,490	42,366
The Trial	Franz Kafka	399,285	22,293	33,296
Daughter of Smoke & Bone	Laini Taylor	385,328	7,465	55,852
Days of Blood & Starlight	Laini Taylor	171,302	3,801	29,219
The Castle	Franz Kafka	76,255	9,351	6,490
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting	Milan Kundera	54,517	6,553	4,548
Letter to His Father	Franz Kafka	63,459	1,914	4,869

This week’s winner is a bit confused and variable in form, which is appropriate enough. Both Goodreads and Storygraph have combined individual printings of The Metamorphosis with collections of Kafka’s short fiction where it is the title story, while LibraryThing tallies every edition and collection separately. However, I did enough lumping of the options on LibraryThing to assure me that the winner there is definitely the same as on the other two systems.

In case you don’t know, the story is about a man who is trasformed overnight into an enormous beetle or cockroach (the German word is “Ungeheuer”, which means “monster”). One could query whether The Metamorphosis is really set in Prague, in that the location is not specified, but it can hardly be anywhere else. (Similarly for the other three Kafka books on the list; they are certainly set in what was then Bohemia rather than anywhere else.)

The runner-up is a novel by Milan Kundera which was made into a famous film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche, about a randy doctor and his girlfriend whose lives are up-ended by the Prague Spring of 1968. Another of Kundera’s novels makes the list and several more are bubbling under.

The result when I last measured this, less systematically, in 2015 was much the same.

The effect of including the Storygraph numbers was to lose The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka and gain his Letter to his Father.

The third author on the list, Laini Taylor, is American, and her very successful series of fantasy novels are set in today’s Prague.

The top book by a woman author who is actually from the Czech republic is Hana by Alena Mornštajnová, which scores decently on Goodreads and StoryGraph but very poorly on LibraryThing. Unless you count Madeleine Albright, who was born in Prague and whose autobiographical Prague Winter scores better.

I disqualified several of Milan Kundera’s later novels set in Paris, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke as the letters were written when he too lived in Paris, Amerika by Franz Kafka which is, oddly enough, set in America, and The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman which is a Holocaust survivor story mostly set elsewhere than the Czech Republic.

Next up are Azerbaijan and Portugal, followed by Togo and then back to Europe again for Greece.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

The best known books set in each country: Czechia / The Czech Republic

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