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Tag Archives: 1984
Orwell: “By 30 November 1948 it was virtually done.”
The story of Orwell writing 1984. It brought me to tears. It was a desperate race against time. Orwell’s health was deteriorating, the “unbelievably bad” manuscript needed retyping, and the December deadline was looming. Warburg promised to help, and so … Continue reading
The Books: “1984″ (George Orwell)
Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction: 1984, by George Orwell. I covered much of my thoughts about this book in my post yesterday about Animal Farm. A bit more about Orwell the man (there’s so much there): Orwell himself wrote about … Continue reading
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
Let’s Hear It For Grandiose Nerds
The other day Alex referred to me as a “grandiose nerd”. I think that about sums it up. I will now give you a tiny glimpse of what I did for about an hour this morning: I read Robert Conquest’s … Continue reading
“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
“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