November 2021: George Orwell

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November 2021: George Orwell

1AnnieMod
Nov 15, 2021, 2:15 pm

In November 2021, we are discussing George Orwell (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) - an English author whose life spanned the first half of the 20th century.

He wrote two major speculative novels: 1984 (1949) and Animal Farm (1945)

The rest of his novels:

1934 – Burmese Days
1935 – A Clergyman's Daughter
1936 – Keep the Aspidistra Flying
1939 – Coming Up for Air

Homage to Catalonia is his most popular non-fiction work about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, published in 1938, a year before this war finished (and the WWII kicked off).

What are you reading this month?

2Tara1Reads
Nov 15, 2021, 7:16 pm

I just picked up Down and Out in Paris and London from the library today. I won’t start it until I finish what I am currently reading.

3cindydavid4
Editado: Nov 18, 2021, 10:05 pm

Thats a very good book, read it ages ago, made an impact on me

If you are interested in an orwell adjacent book, Finding George Orwell in Burma is a travelogue that traces the life and work of George Orwell, author of 1984 and ANIMAL FARM, in Southeast Asia.

4john257hopper
Editado: Nov 29, 2021, 5:16 am

Orwell is one of my favourite 20th century writers. I have read Coming Up for Air. This was my second read of this wonderful 1938 novel, possibly my favourite Orwell novel (along with the very different and later 1984), and indeed one of my favourite novels of all time. George Bowling is a lower middle class middle aged man with a nagging and remorselessly downbeat wife and two annoying children, and the novel is essentially his search, ultimately fruitless, to recapture the simplicity and happiness of his youth in a small town before the Great War. He recognises life was far from perfect then, with his parents' generation facing the potential threat of the workhouse if their shop went out of business, but he is searching for the elusive inner happiness and peace that I guess many of us search for all our lives and may sometimes find: "what was it that people had in those days? A feeling of security, even when they weren’t secure. More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity. All of them knew they’d got to die, and I suppose a few of them knew they were going to go bankrupt, but what they didn’t know was that the order of things could change. Whatever might happen to themselves, things would go on as they'd known them."

Taking advantage of a win of as much as £17 in a bet, he takes off in his car with his new found riches to enjoy a week on his own to stay in a hotel and enjoy good food and drink and look up the town where he grew up. He searches, but he finds it unrecognisable - swallowed up in a larger urban area where his family and way of life are forgotten. He doesn't rail against this, it is more of a bittersweet resignation to the inevitability of change. Mixed with these emotions is his fear of the impending war with Hitler's Germany changing the whole nature of existence: "The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool — and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside — belongs to the time before the war, before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler". There is a really striking and often quite bleak and stifling atmosphere of the impending war and the totalitarian future that George believes will be that war's inevitable follow up, reflecting Orwell's fear of the twin totalitarian extremes of fascism and communism. One can almost see George Bowling transmuting into 1984's Winston Smith. He says: "I’ve enough sense to see that the old life we’re used to is being sawn off at the roots. I can feel it happening. 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". This description may make this sound like a bleak novel but it is anything but - it is a humorous and bittersweet story, and is truly wonderful, especially if you're a middle aged man yourself!

5Yells
Nov 30, 2021, 5:07 pm

Just finished Burmese Days. A fascinatingly painful read about British rule in Burma. The extreme racism was really difficult to stomach so it took a while to read this one through.

Flory, a low level merchant, lives the bachelor life in Kyauktada. He straddles the line as he enjoys all the comforts of a British life but also has a Burmese mistress and Indian friend on the side. He belongs to the local European club, which is under pressure to open membership up to others, and he thinks Dr Veraswami would be a good candidate for nomination. This, of course, causes a whole host of problems and Orwell takes us on a journey of the effects of colonialism.

>4 john257hopper: I haven't read that one yet, but it keeps popping up. I'll add it to my 2022 list. :)

6john257hopper
Dez 1, 2021, 8:38 am

>5 Yells: I read that one years ago. One of my least favourite of his novels, but probably preferred it to Keep the Aspidistra flying whose central character irritated me a lot!