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Everyone should read Animal Farm and 1984. I read the family copy of Animal Farm 8th grade summer, and we regularly quoted Animal Farm back and forth growing up
by CalChris 5y ago
Everyone should read Animal Farm and 1984. I read the family copy of Animal Farm 8th grade summer, and we regularly quoted Animal Farm back and forth growing up. I later read Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margerita and enjoyed it but when I had a Russian girlfriend she explained that I didn't understand it at all. It was the Russian Animal Farm but you really had to know Russian history to understand the allegories.
I read Down and Out my first year of college. What stuck with me was his idea that it is very expensive to be poor.
I read Shooting an Elephant for an English class. It's hard not to think of the pointlessness of the Great Game when thinking about Afghanistan.
Politics and the English Language, Notes on Nationalism, ...
Orwell was a great writer. Hitchens wanted to be Orwell. Hitchens was good but, nope, not Orwell. Hitchens was unbelievably wrongly wrong about Iraq and would never admit it. He should have re-read Shooting an Elephant very slowly, very carefully, with a long suffering English lecturer patiently getting its point across. It'd help if he'd actually lived there instead of just wearing a Kurdish pin.
- pjc50 5y ago> Hitchens was unbelievably wrongly wrong about Iraq and would never admit it This absolutely disintegrated the UK left, especially the more "modern liberal" end, because they'd got on board the idea of gunpoint liberation of post-colonial countries run by strongmen and/or Islamists. When this turned out to be a disaster, there was nowhere ideologically to go that didn't involve admitting error. Like Orwell, they came to Iraq with no choice other than to shoot the elephant.
- CalChris 5y agoYes, but Orwell having shot the elephant understood the pointlessness of it, understood that the Great Game was being played back on the West. Hitchens never got that, or never admitted to getting that.
- lostlogin 5y agoHomage to Catalonia Is another great book I’d add to your review list. His description of trench warfare and if bayonetting someone is one of the more horrible things I’ve read.
- CalChris 5y agoThanks, I did read Homage to Catalonia. I read A Farewell to Arms at about the same time. I think my Orange County high school education had Ronald Reagan winning WWII and that was pretty much it. They didn't teach the Depression and they sure didn't teach the Spanish Civil War as a prelude to WWII.
- redwood 5y agoI loved Down and Out, great to see you reference it! I did dishes at a restaurant gig in a foreign country once: talk about a character building expertise!
- secondbreakfast 5y agoInteresting, why do you think Hitchens wanted to be Orwell? [I know he was a huge admirer, but he also seemed he lived quite a different life with different kinds of output.]