Reading Matters

'Books v. cigarettes' by George Orwell

Non-fiction - paperback; Penguin; 144 pages; 2008.

Books v. cigarettes is a small collection of essays by George Orwell brought together as part of Penguin's Great Ideas Series 3. The title of the book comes from an essay of the same name in which Orwell considers how much money he spends on his two vices, reading and smoking. This particular essay, first published in the Tribune on 8 February, 1946, will resonate with book lovers the world over, because how many of us have foregone some other pleasure (or necessity) in favour of a good book?

To prove that reading is not an expensive hobby out of the reach of ordinary citizens, Orwell counts all the books he owns (this sounds remarkably like what I have done in recent weeks, tackling my TBR piles) and adds up their total price to work out how much money he has spent on reading over a 15-year period. He discovers he has some 900 books and that it has cost him a little over £11 per year. 

He also includes his newspaper and periodicals intake, which is quite impressive: £8 per year on "two daily papers, one evening paper, two Sunday papers, one weekly review and one or two monthly magazines".  (I suspect if Orwell was around today he'd be a complete internet junkie, reading all the news sites, book blogs, Twitter feeds and so on.) He also spends roughly £6 per year on library subscriptions and cheap paperbacks, chiefly Penguins, "which one buys and then loses or throws away". 

All up, he estimates reading costs him £25 per year, which, according to this calculator, is the equivalent of £648 in today's money. By comparison, he spends £20 a year on cigarettes and beer.

In the grand scheme of things, he thinks this is quite reasonable although he points out that it is difficult to establish "any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them".

His second essay, Bookshop Memories, recalls his time spent working in a second-hand bookshop. His observations are both slightly snobby ("I doubt whether 10 per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one") and acutely funny:

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who 'wants a book for an invalid' (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she doesn't remember the title or the author's name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover.

This quote made me laugh out loud, because I spent six years working in bookshops and used to get vague requests like this all the time!

Books v. cigarettes also includes a wonderful essay about reviewing books and another on the state of literature, which will appeal to bibliophiles. The rest of this slim volume tackles other non-bookish subjects: patriotism, the relationship between doctors and patients, and Orwell's childhood memoirs spent at an exclusive boarding school for which he obtained a scholarship.

All up, this is a perfect, effortless read, highly personable and quite bookish, if you like that sort of thing.

'Coming Up for Air' by George Orwell

 

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 256 pages; 2001.

George Orwell wrote Coming Up for Air in 1939, a decade before his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's a strange, beguiling and quite humorous novel, but there's a dark undertone that sums up the time period in which it was written, as Britain hovered on the edge of war.

The story, which is commonly thought to be thinly veiled autobiography, is narrated by George Bowling, a 45-year-old married man with two children who's bored with his life as an insurance salesman. He lives in the "inner-outer suburbs" in one of those streets that looks like every other, comprising a long, long row of "little semi-detached houses as much like council houses but generally uglier". He's just had a new set of false teeth fitted and his waistline is expanding at an alarming rate. Hmmm, sounds charming, doesn't he?

With the country on the brink of war and bombing planes flying low overhead, George retreats into the world of nostalgia and spends most of the novel recalling his semi-idyllic childhood in a village outside of London. He gets so lost in this reverie, where he no longer has to worry about the 9-to-5 treadmill and his dreary commute, that he hits upon an idea: he'll take a secret holiday, sans kids and wife, to the village he grew up in to soak up that wonderful, happy atmosphere once again. But in the heat of the moment he forgets one important thing: the march of progress and its impact on the rural way of life he longs to revisit so keenly. What he finds when he arrives isn't quite what he expected...

If nothing else, Coming Up for Air pays homage to English country life at the turn of the 19th century and the ways in which little boys grew up, carefree and obsessed by egg-collecting, fishing and other wildlife pursuits, before the horrors of the First World War changed things forever.

But the most interesting aspect of this novel is seeing the seeds of Nineteen Eighty-Four buried in the narrative. For instance, before George escapes to the village of his childhood, he's fearful of the current political climate -- "Hitler, Stalin, bombs, machine-guns, rubber truncheons, Rome-Berlin axis, Popular Front, anti-Comintern pact" -- even though he believes no one else is much bothered.

I can see the war that's coming and I can see the after-war, the food queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think.

When he attends a lecture in the local hall with his wife and her female companions (remember, this is in the days before TV and such lectures were common entertainment), he feels slightly detached from the speaker who, predictably, pitches "into Hitler and the Nazis". But for anyone who's read Nineteen Eighty-Four the following sounds very much like the germ of the idea of the "two minutes hate":

A rather mean little man, with a white face and a bald-head, standing on a platform, shooting out slogans. Whats he doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he's stirring up hatred. [...] He means it. Not faking at all -- feels every word he's saying. He's trying to work up hatred in the audience, but that's nothing to the hatred he feels himself. Every slogan's gospel truth to him. If you cut him open all you'd find inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy.

But the book's not entirely humourless, because even if the narrator's not exactly likable, he does have a habit of taking the mickey out of himself and others. Here he describes the audience members at the lecture:

...a little woman with red hair was knitting a jumper. One plain, two purl, drop one and knit two together. The lecturer was describing how the Nazis chop people's heads off for treason and sometimes the executioner makes a bosh shot. There was another woman in the audience, a girl with dark hair, one of the teachers at the School Council, really listening, sitting forward with her big round eyes fixed on the lecturer and her mouth a little bit open, drinking it all in.

On the whole, though, this is a rather pessimistic novel about a man trying to come to terms with a lost Edwardian childhood while a war with Germany looms large on the horizon.

'Nineteen Eighty-Four' by George Orwell

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 352 pages; 2004.

How do you review a book that is a true 20th Century classic like George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four without simply regurgitating all that has been said before? Is there really anything more I can add to the mix? Probably not, but that won't stop me telling you just a little about this brilliant dystopian novel, first publishing in 1949, and why I love it so much.

For those of you who have never read Orwell's masterpiece (a term I don't use lightly), it's set in London in 1984. The city, which belongs to one of the world's three superstates, is under Totalitarian rule and at perpetual war. Everyone lives under the watchful eye of Big Brother, children are encouraged to spy against their parents, and to even think "bad" thoughts is considered a crime.

Winston Smith, the narrator, works for the Ministry of Truth, rewriting Times articles so that the ruling Party's version of history, which changes on a daily basis, is always correct. But Winston is not like everyone else and considers that the continual surveillance and collective world view is oppressive and stifles individuality. He's also alarmed by the number of people who are "disappeared" and re-written out of history because they haven't toed the Party line.

When he meets the intriguing Julia and begins an illicit romance with her, he discovers that he is not the only secret "rebel". But this liaison does not escape the Thought Police and Winston is thrown into prison, where the "secrets" of the Party are finally revealed to him.

I first read this book circa 1994 when I was studying journalism and I remember, quite clearly, the oppression resonating off the page. It was a dark, incredibly thought-provoking story, and with every turn of the page I could feel my whole world view being challenged on very many different levels: was history a true record of the past? was the news media so corrupt? were wars just a means to stimulate the economy and keep people in jobs? were the enemies of the West just a conspiracy invented to keep us living in fear?

Fast forward 15 years and I re-read the book as part of my book group last month. This time 'round, my brain, having already grappled with these new and alarming concepts, now concentrated on whether Orwell's "predictions" had come true. And because I was less caught up in the overwhelming brilliance of the book's scope and vision, I enjoyed the narrative, which is quite fast-paced, and the eloquence of the prose, which is sparse without ever becoming boring.

The thing that struck me most, however, was how much of this futuristic novel was deeply rooted in the time in which Orwell wrote it. There are echoes of war-torn London throughout this book, not the least in the following passage:

He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance -- above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat.

Obviously there's a lot of stuff that feels incredibly prescient today: the so-called War on Terror and its resultant erosion of civil liberties; the increasing reliance on media spin, particularly by government agencies; and the ever-present CCTV surveillance, especially here in the UK (in 2006, there was one CCTV camera for every 14 people).

By contrast, Orwell's prediction that the future would be sexless didn't quite come off, and even the notion that you only had to alter The Times newspaper to rewrite history seems laughable given today's preponderance of media outlets and formats, including the internet and mobile phone technology.

But, on the whole, this is a remarkable book, a kind of warning shot from the past, that still resonates and which will continue to resonate long into the future. If you've never read this book, I urge you to do so, and even if you have, it's worth revisiting just to re-experience Orwell's amazing vision.

For a rather wonderful breakdown of the novel, including explanations of the terminology, visit the wikipedia entry.

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This book was chosen by Gemma as part of our London-based face-to-face book group. Here's some other posts written about the book by fellow members:

• Claire's review

• Simon's review