This is a nice collection of four essays by Orwell, three very short and one much longer, and I'm going to treat them separately, because that gives me an excuse to inflict Orwell's gorgeous prose on you several times.

"Why I Write"

Third paragraph:However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with there ( Read more... )

The Ramblas today was not much like George Orwell describes it in the opening of Chapter X of Homage to Catalonia. The buildings are all mostly still there, but the human landscape is a bit more peaceful
About midday on 3 May a friend crossing the lounge of the hotel said casually: 'There's been some kind of trouble at the Telephone Exchange, I hear ( Read more... )

It's just as well that I read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia a few months back, or I would have felt a bit unmoored in this Eighth Doctor story of the Spanish Civil War. There is a time-changing entity plot, but I found myself instead appreciating Halliday's recreation of the awfulness of the 1930s, with one Eric Blair wandering in and out of the ( Read more... )

I'm not sure that I'd read any of Orwell's non-fiction of any length before. It is a great personal account of taking up arms in an idealistic struggle, and finding that the grim realities are not especially glamorous, and that indeed the political leadership is more concerned with internal manœuvring for power on their own side than with actually ( Read more... )

The second paragraph from Chapter 3:( long )

4) Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell

Managed to read this on the way to Worldcon and in the rare insomniac moments while there. Of course I must have read it a couple of times as a teenager but it's always interesting to come back to it. Just a few things that struck me on rereading:

1. It's not so much a novel as a set of political statements ( Read more... )