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Tag Archives: George Orwell
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
Jessa Crispin has an interesting interview with Peter Boxall, editor of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I loved what Boxall said at the end: Having benefited from an extraordinary number of emails and letters as well as … Continue reading
Posted in Books, James Joyce
Tagged 1984, A Prayer for Owen Meany, A Tale of Two Cities, A.S. Byatt, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Alice in Wonderland, Amongst Women, Animal Farm, Annie Proulx, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, At Swim-Two-Birds, Atonement, Cat's Eye, Catch-22, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, D.H. Lawrence, Don DeLillo, E.M. Forster, Edgar Allan Poe, Edna O'Brien, Emily Bronte, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Finnegans Wake, Flann O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, Frankenstein, Franny and Zooey, George Eliot, George Orwell, Great Expectations, Gulliver's Travels, Handmaid's Tale, Herman Melville, House of Leaves, Hunter S. Thompson, Ian McEwan, In Cold Blood, J.D. Salinger, J.R.R. Tolkien, James Ellroy, Jane Austen, Jane Eyre, Jeanette Winterson, John Irving, John McGahern, John Steinbeck, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Heller, Kazuo Ishiguro, Leo Tolstoy, Lewis Carroll, Lord of the Rings, Margaret Atwood, Mark Danielewski, Mary Shelley, Master and Margarita, Middlemarch, Mikhail Bulgakov, Moby Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Notes From the Underground, Possession, Pride and Prejudice, Primo Levi, Sexing the Cherry, Stephen King, The Catcher In the Rye, The Country Girls, The Great Gatsby, The Hobbit, The Passion, The Shipping News, The Things They Carried, Thomas Mann, Tim O'Brien, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Ulysses, Underworld, Vladimir Nabokov, Wuthering Heights
9 Comments
Dickens’ Monsters
More from George Orwell’s essay on Dickens. The fact that Dickens is always thought of as a caricaturist, although he was constantly trying to be something else, is perhaps the surest mark of his genius. The monstrosities that he created … Continue reading
Orwell on Dickens
I’m in the process right now of reading George Orwell’s mammoth (and unbelievably good) essay on Charles Dickens. It is dense, exciting – and it’s making me want to pick up all of those books again. I re-read Great Expectations … Continue reading
Snapshots
— I have now graduated in my life to a higher thread count. I have been living for years with kinda scratchy low-thread-count sheets, because I never wanted to spend the money for the higher thread-count. But after rolling around … Continue reading
Totalitarian Reading
Over the weekend I finished two books: Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens (READ IT) and Language of the Third Reich: LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii by Viktor Klemperer (I could say READ IT – but you would seriously have to … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged Christopher Hitchens, George Orwell, politics, Rebecca West, Robert Conquest, Robert Kaplan, war
60 Comments
“Grokking” Stalin And The Murder of Kirov
Update: I just realized that my description of 3 a.m. anxiety may obscure the rest of the post, which would be unfortunate. So if you want to skip over that part to get to the Stalin stuff, feel free. You … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged 1984, George Orwell, Hopeful Monsters, Robert Conquest, Russia, Sergei Kirov, Stalin, The Great Terror
30 Comments
George Orwell: “Reality Unhinged”
“It is, I think, true to say that the [British] intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left … Continue reading
“With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought…”
From George Orwell’s 1984, which I am now rereading: He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. … Continue reading
Orwell
“It is, I think, true to say that the [British] intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left … Continue reading