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3.82 AVERAGE
3.82 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
It sucks super bad to be a coal miner. It's stinky and the food is nasty. Socialism might be the remedy but normal people aren't ready for it. Maybe because they're bad people. The end.
Disappointing. The first half is descriptive and evocative of a vanished way of life. Orwell writes in such a way that the reader is immersed in the subject, his description of down the mine being particularly strong. However the second half is for the main part a repetitive, rambling rant about pet subjects. True, he warned obliquely about the coming Fascist-led War but his point is almost lost in verbosity. The last two pages of the book could replace the whole of Part 2. Socialist sensitivity was obviously offended and the commissioners got more than what they bargained for but I can't help but feel that if Orwell had been less vitriolic he may well have been more successful in his call to Socialist arms.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
This was a difficult book to get through, though not one that people should avoid. Heavy insight as to what life was like for many people back then.
I got conflicting feelings about this. On one hand George Orwell writes very good and informative about the living conditions and his views on socialism. I learned a lot I didn't know but geez it was boring/tedious to read. It feelt like I was back in school listening to a teacher that while was talking about interesting stuff, wasn't a very good at making it enjoyable to listen to. I enjoy George Orwell novels so much more because while it was bleak and serious the reading experience was top knoch
Interesting point of view on Socialism, especially back in 1930s too with how everything looked like in the North England. And interesting point of view of Orwells thoughts of Socialism too.
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
A book in two distinct parts, both eerily current for being written in the 1930s. The first describes the conditions of the poor in England. A simple enough concept, but done with such beauty and fury that it should radicalize any decent, thinking person. The second is a combined autobiography and strategy for socialist success. Putting aside Orwell's dated, petty jabs at vegetarians, feminists, and others, his analysis of the political environment is incredibly valuable. Discussing the declining middle class, encroaching fascism, leftist infighting, and how to properly frame arguments to recruit more to our cause, it is as if he is speaking directly to the Left today.
Orwell is who I want to be. I want to be like Orwell. That's my biggest takeaway. When I started this three book tour de Orwell, I didn't really know what to expect. Sorry for the page and a half review. This is the one of the most important books people don't read.
Both Homage and Down and Out both stuck to a formula of plain-speaking the mundanity of the reality of the poor and their hygiene and habits, or the bleakness of life on the front in Spain fighting against the Fascists. From time to time Orwell opines or inserts a chapter of commentary on his observations. It's almost like a Science report in that he attempts to keep his bias out of his story-telling, but then comes along to smack you with his editorial anyway. I loved those chapters of his the best, because his commentary is smart, concise, and wickedly penetrative.
The Road to Wigan Pier takes the above effect to the extreme. The first half of the book describes the squalid conditions of life as a coal miner in the 1930's, painting a life so bleak and dark that I really have to consider ever having complained about my own work/life balance. He also paints in detail the sparse and grimey home lives of those living in unemployment. The descriptions make you want not take up food for a bit. It's an effect a lot of Orwell's writing has on you. You kind of sit and look at your food and knives and forks and avocados and milk in cartons and say, "God fucking bless America".
But there was very little commentary, and I didn't really know what he was getting at, beyond being a clinical reporter. Then Part II hits, and Orwell just goes on this EPIC analysis of Socialism and Fascism, and their prospective proponents and opponents, and how each views the other. It's quite an under-taking that shows a consciousness that I can't imagine a progressive today entertaining, much less attempting to write.
He torches the left and ideologues in all of the ways that they deserve to be torched, and he does so to better them, so that they can more capably confront their opposition. Today the left even calls out the idea of 'Devil's Advocacy'. It's either hive-mind agreement, or you're excised from the group.
Orwell weighs Socialism against Technology and Machines, and notes that the ideology requires technology. He makes an observation that Socialism could only have arisen from an Industrial age, and I think that's a valid and true point that modern Progressives don't acknowledge enough. Their entire ideology thrives ONLY in the system that they detest. It was incapable of growth or competition at any other time in history.
This and a handful of other observations led me to think about Orwell's wizardry. I don't know if Orwell was a magician, but you get this sense that he had resolved duality, and understood the true natural laws. A quote of his, "The truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain or difficulty; but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster, pain and difficulty." After that thought, he follows up with this interchange between Work and Play being the same thing viewed differently. He illustrates time and time again that he's able to resolve opposites, something most people aren't capable of.
Orwell gets a lot wrong in this book, but he gets a lot right as well. "It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist Party." That could have been read aloud at any time in the last five years without a sense that it's source was a century earlier.
Orwell fully admits that he was an oppressor who committed grave sins, and then spent the rest of his life attempting to absolve himself of those sins. This whole three-book tour came about as a way for him to attempt to ameliorate his previous sins. So there's a handful of interesting observations within that I think I see a lot of my peers today working through.
"I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate. I suppose that sounds exaggerated; but if you do for five years at a job that you thoroughly disapprove of, you will probably feel the same. I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory, but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself."
This is one of those books that should be read more than it is, specifically in places where ideology abounds, as a self-check. We need writers like Orwell who are capable of seeing the entire raging tempest, and showing people where the light is within it. We need people willing to call out our intellectual agreements and show us where they may alienate others. He was a bridge builder, and so should we all be.
Both Homage and Down and Out both stuck to a formula of plain-speaking the mundanity of the reality of the poor and their hygiene and habits, or the bleakness of life on the front in Spain fighting against the Fascists. From time to time Orwell opines or inserts a chapter of commentary on his observations. It's almost like a Science report in that he attempts to keep his bias out of his story-telling, but then comes along to smack you with his editorial anyway. I loved those chapters of his the best, because his commentary is smart, concise, and wickedly penetrative.
The Road to Wigan Pier takes the above effect to the extreme. The first half of the book describes the squalid conditions of life as a coal miner in the 1930's, painting a life so bleak and dark that I really have to consider ever having complained about my own work/life balance. He also paints in detail the sparse and grimey home lives of those living in unemployment. The descriptions make you want not take up food for a bit. It's an effect a lot of Orwell's writing has on you. You kind of sit and look at your food and knives and forks and avocados and milk in cartons and say, "God fucking bless America".
But there was very little commentary, and I didn't really know what he was getting at, beyond being a clinical reporter. Then Part II hits, and Orwell just goes on this EPIC analysis of Socialism and Fascism, and their prospective proponents and opponents, and how each views the other. It's quite an under-taking that shows a consciousness that I can't imagine a progressive today entertaining, much less attempting to write.
He torches the left and ideologues in all of the ways that they deserve to be torched, and he does so to better them, so that they can more capably confront their opposition. Today the left even calls out the idea of 'Devil's Advocacy'. It's either hive-mind agreement, or you're excised from the group.
Orwell weighs Socialism against Technology and Machines, and notes that the ideology requires technology. He makes an observation that Socialism could only have arisen from an Industrial age, and I think that's a valid and true point that modern Progressives don't acknowledge enough. Their entire ideology thrives ONLY in the system that they detest. It was incapable of growth or competition at any other time in history.
This and a handful of other observations led me to think about Orwell's wizardry. I don't know if Orwell was a magician, but you get this sense that he had resolved duality, and understood the true natural laws. A quote of his, "The truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain or difficulty; but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster, pain and difficulty." After that thought, he follows up with this interchange between Work and Play being the same thing viewed differently. He illustrates time and time again that he's able to resolve opposites, something most people aren't capable of.
Orwell gets a lot wrong in this book, but he gets a lot right as well. "It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist Party." That could have been read aloud at any time in the last five years without a sense that it's source was a century earlier.
Orwell fully admits that he was an oppressor who committed grave sins, and then spent the rest of his life attempting to absolve himself of those sins. This whole three-book tour came about as a way for him to attempt to ameliorate his previous sins. So there's a handful of interesting observations within that I think I see a lot of my peers today working through.
"I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate. I suppose that sounds exaggerated; but if you do for five years at a job that you thoroughly disapprove of, you will probably feel the same. I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory, but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself."
This is one of those books that should be read more than it is, specifically in places where ideology abounds, as a self-check. We need writers like Orwell who are capable of seeing the entire raging tempest, and showing people where the light is within it. We need people willing to call out our intellectual agreements and show us where they may alienate others. He was a bridge builder, and so should we all be.