David Bowie, the Eurythmics and Pink Floyd have all recorded albums inspired by Orwell's writings. Orwell has resonated with many musical artists. Pritchett once described him as having had "gone native in his own country." Traveling made him anxious, as he worried that he wouldn't be able to find the "proper" tea. Orwell was so devoted to his native England that his friend V.S.
(Harry Potter's nemesis Voldemort came in tenth). For now I think I am maybe making a transition from bibliophilia to bibliomania.Big Brother was named the "Scariest Character in Literature" in a poll at the Web site. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.
The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can’t borrow, and I never buy junk. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. Pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.īut as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. I never sold my books, and hopefully will never need to.Īnd if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less If you bought only second-hand books, your reading expenses would, of course, be much less: perhaps sixpence an hour would be a fair estimate. In either case you would still possess the books after you had read them, and they would be saleable at about a third of their purchase price. The books would cost more but they would take longer to read. If you concentrated on more serious books, and still bought everything that you read, your expenses would be about the same. But of course there are crap books and there are crap people.
Books are actually people who talk to us, make us experience things we would otherwise not experience, isn’t the same true of people also. Some people give us sound advice, many books save us from despair. Some people we make our heroes, some books give us our philosophy of life. Seen in this way at another level, books are just ideas that are present in them, so are the humans we come in contact with (though at times the physical intimacy is better, (but isn’t physical intimacy also an idea)). Just as he describes different types of books, some of which we just dip into, some we savour for our lives, some we just refer maybe once in a while, so are our human contacts, some are just hi-bye types, some we share our intimate moments with, some we just meet once in our lives, but they are unforgettable, some we just forget, and others we want to forget. Here I see an analogy between books and humans (or is it the other way round?). But if one regards reading simply as a recreation, like going to the pictures, then it is possible to make a rough estimate of what it costs. There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter one’s whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later: and the cost, in terms of money, may be the same in each case. You may spend ten shillings on a poem of 500 lines, and you may spend sixpence on a dictionary which you consult at odd moments over a period of twenty years.
“Books” includes novels, poetry, text books, works of reference, sociological treatises and much else, and length and price do not correspond to one another, especially if one habitually buys books second-hand. It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them. I have lost many books, but there are may be more with me which belong to others, but which I did not steal. Well may be in the long run it is indeed true. This is because book-giving, book-borrowing and book-stealing more or less even out. The idea that the buying, or even the reading, of books is an expensive hobby and beyond the reach of the average person is so widespread that it deserves some detailed examination.Įven now I know of people who get and give weird reactions to the sight of books, as if they are something ugly and avoidable. He says out of the 900 odd books he has, around 500 are bought second-hand. Me being a bibliophile could relate to many things he said. Cigarretes and Bookshop Memories George Orwell tells us what he thinks about books.
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