Unexpected Orwellian influence

Lately Cathy and I have been dining out in Wetherspoons pubs. It may be surprising but the company is very good at providing nutritional information and there are three different things on the menu that Cathy can eat while sticking to her medically recommended low fat diet. 

And there are Wetherspoons everywhere, so when we travel we know we can eat in one, which is why we end up in so many. 

However, when we visited the 'Spoons in Wolverhampton there was a surprise waiting for us. The Wetherspoons there is called 'The Moon Under Water' and it's named after... George Orwell's dream pub!

I wasn't 'specting that in a 'Spoons!

Three quotes from Coming Up For Air

This month I read Coming Up For Air by George Orwell. (Review here.) I like Orwell's prose and he has a sharp wit. Here are three quotes that made me laugh or nod in agreement.

As the main character ruminates on being married...

"When a woman's bumped off, her husband is always the first suspect - which gives you a little side-glimpse of what people really think about marriage."

I knew exactly the kind of day he meant with this...

"You know the kind of day that generally comes some time in March when winter suddenly seems to give up fighting.  For days past we'd been having the kind of beastly weather that people call 'bright' weather, when the sky's a cold hard blue and the wind scrapes you like a blunt razor-blade. Then suddenly the wind had dropped and the sun got a chance."

And as a driver of an older car with a lot of mileage on it, this bit about his car rang true too...

"You wouldn't believe any machine could vibrate in so many directions at once. It's like the motion of the earth, which has twenty-two different kinds of wobble, or so I remember reading."

It shows how good a writer George Orwell was that 85 years after this book was published I was smiling and nodding as I read it.

Books of the Month - a trio of twentieth century novels

Recently TK Maxx has had a great selection of books available below list price. (Including several different editions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which felt a bit odd.) Over the last couple of months I've bought some older fiction that caught my eye. I'm going to review them in chronological order, starting with the oldest.

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

I'd never read any Hemingway, and this might not have been the best novel to start with. However, it sounded interesting from the blurb on the back. The basic premise is that a bunch of dissolute American ex-pats living in Paris in the mid-1920s decide to go to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls and the bullfight there in the fiesta. 

It's not all bullfights and drinking. Along the way some characters go fishing. There's a deep love for angling in the writing, almost as much as there is fascination for bullfighting. Within the group of tourists there is a woman who is the object of attention for several men, including the narrator, who is carrying a war injury. It's never spelled out but the inference is his wound prevents him from functioning sexually. 

And that's about it. The various infatuated men either get with the woman or don't. The narrator seems detached from all their drama. The Spanish and French characters are just background or mainly there to be patronised. There's some antisemitism and a one character discusses a black boxer he admires using the N word to describe him. 

And fair enough, the book was published in 1927 so what else would be expected. It's an outsider's viewpoint with an ingrained superiority and yet a hollow sense that the people they are so superior to actually have more authenticity. The main characters flit through and observe, are amused by what they see, and then flit off and in the process are utterly meaningless. The fiesta would happen with or without them.

Overall it hasn't inspired me to actively seek out any more Hemingway. It had its moments. (If you like fishing, I think you'd like that chunk of the story!) But I wasn't sorry to finish reading it. 

Coming Up For Air - George Orwell

From the mid-20s to a novel published in 1939 and full of semi-prophetic foreboding about the looming war between Britain and Germany. There's a weighty inevitability to the coming conflict that is reflected throughout this novel - but it's what will come after that really terrifies the protagonist, an era of secret police and endless propaganda. 

When I read On 1984 by DJ Taylor, which was a book about how Orwell wrote that book, this novel and Homage to Catalonia were mentioned as feeding into the key ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Having read both books now, I see what Taylor meant. There's a lot here about the way memories preserve things that have been otherwise obliterated by progress and how the world was going to change. 

The book is set in four parts. In part 1, George, the 45 year-old protagonist is unsettled in his life as an insurance salesman, married with kids and trapped in suburbia. In part 2, he recounts his life growing up in a little Oxfordshire village, his experience in the First World War and his subsequent career in sales,  made possible by the social upheavals caused by the war. In part 3, the hatches a plan to use some money that his wife doesn't know about to fund a trip back to the village he grew up in. And in part 4 he makes the trip which ultimately ends up in disappointment and realising that you can never truly go back. 

There is quite a bit of humour in the book, particularly George's life story. There are several vignettes that capture some true-to-life experiences and observations of people. We stray into some unprogressive views when George the protagonist (and possibly George the author) shares some negative opinions about women, although in fairness several male characters come in for a verbal bruising as well. 

Orwell is good at describing archetypal characters, like men living on faded glories, the genuinely wealthy, the penny-pinching middle-class who don't have funds to match their status, the tory-voting suburban families desperately working to pay their mortgages, and the hard-working, perpetually screwed-over poor. He has particular fun mocking the earnest young men who are various shades of communist and argue fine points of political dogma as if any of it matters. George (and probably George as well) are older and wiser than that and recognise it's all futile.

Despite that negative cast to the story, and the depressing conclusions drawn by the protagonist as his trip doesn't work out as he naively expected, I enjoyed reading this. I find Orwell a very readable author. His character's inner monologue is engaging, and while George the protagonist makes no claim to be a hero or a good person he is extraordinarily sympathetic. I might not have felt that if I had read the book when I was younger, but now I'm in my 40s and slightly horrified how long ago my school and university days are now, I get where he is coming from. 

The Stepford Wives - Ira Levin

And so this trio of reviews jumps forward to the 1970s. This is a very short book, with incredibly lean prose. A lot is left to the imagination with one sentence or a short paragraph summing up key events that move the story forward.

I knew the basic outline of this story without ever having read it or seen any of the film adaptations. The main character is Joanna Eberhard, who moves with her husband, Walter, and children to the seemingly idyllic community of Stepford. She soon notices there is something odd and docile about most of the other women in the town and the few free spirits she encounters seem to be creepily changed somehow after a few months living there. 

The basic gist is that the men of the town have a secret society and have found a way to turn their partners into "perfect" housewives. Joanna realises she needs to escape from Stepford to avoid a similar fate and the story takes a tense turn as she flees. That section was very well written and I had to keep reading to find out whether she made it out or not. 

The edition I read had an introduction by Chuck Pahlahniuk, the author of Fight Club and several other novels. I read the intro after I had read the book - to avoid spoilers. (That proved to be a good choice!) Chuck thinks The Stepford Wives is a warning of a backlash against feminism and that Levin is just illustrating a more fundamental truth - men will just find a different way of putting women in boxes. It's an interesting take and shows that even a comparatively short novel can have depth and layers to it. 

I recognised the titles of most of Levin's other novels and would like to read more of his work, which I think is the highest credit a reader can give. The Stepford Wives really captivated me and I've found myself thinking about it several times after I finished the book. 

"It's a little bit Nineteen Eighty-Four...

...when it feels like every book on the shelf is Nineteen Eighty-Four!"

What's your favourite cover?

This photo was taken at TK Maxx, where the shelves are groaning under Orwell's books at the moment. TK is where I bought the book about Nineteen Eighty-Four and a copy of Homage to Catalonia that I reviewed last year. 

The book is out of copyright so any publisher can produce a copy. There must be a vibe in the zeitgeist that's making so many publishers send this to the printers at the moment. 

Books of the Month - a double dose of George Orwell

Two books this month - one about George Orwell and one written by him that I hadn't read before. 

On Nineteen Eighty-Four by DJ Taylor is described as a 'biography' of Orwell's most famous book. It's divided into three parts looking at the sources, creative process and reception given to the novel. 

The first section examines the elements of Orwell's personal history, career and previous novels that fed into the development of the key themes of Nineteen Eighty-Four - the paranoia, the malleability of truth, and the brutal reality of totalitarianism. I found it fascinating how the themes of powerlessness follows most of Orwell's main protagonists who are trapped in various circumstances although none as blatantly evil as poor Winston Smith's world. 

Before reading this book I didn't know that Orwell spent some of the second world war developing propaganda, in a building that matches the description of the Ministry of Truth where Winston works. Orwell's boss there had the initials 'BB', the same as Big Brother. 

Another major influence on Orwell was his experience fighting against fascism during the Spanish Civil War. Here he saw first hand how lies were spread by his own side by Stalinists operating on instructions from the Soviet Union. A lot of his anger about that was channelled into Animal Farm which is an allegory for the way the communist revolution in Russia morphed into grim totalitarianism. But several of his experiences in Spain reappear in more subtle ways in Nineteen Eighty-Four as well. 

The second section details the process of writing the novel and particularly the impact on Orwell's health. Taylor paints the picture of Orwell writing out of a sense of urgency, feeling he had to get Winston Smith's story written to explain exactly why totalitarianism was so dangerous. I was left in no doubt that his sense of mission to complete the book pretty much killed him. He died not long after publication, although he was aware that the book was a massive success.

The third section is an account of what came next as Nineteen Eighty-Four took the world by storm. It covers how the book was weaponised by the CIA and banned in the USSR, turned into stage plays and movies (one of which had different endings on different continents) and of course added several words and phrases to the lexicon (which I wrote about in the early years of this blog).

I haven't read many books about books because it feels a bit meta, but I was captivated by this story about a book that took the life of its author and then proceeded to take on a life of its own. 

And so on to book 2 for the month...

Fresh off the back of reading about Nineteen Eighty-Four, I finally read Homage to Catalonia, which was George Orwell's account of fighting in the Spanish Civil War. This was a contemporary account of the conflict, printed before the war was resolved. As a result it assumes the reader knows what's going on - so I spent the first few chapters looking things up on Wikipedia. 

Orwell is very honest about how serving at the front was a mix of extreme boredom interspersed with moments of chaos and naked danger. He discusses how he is aware of his conflicting feelings - that war is terrible, but glorious; that it's a good thing to shoot and kill fascists but that the men in the other trenches aren't really that different to him; and that this was the most important thing he could be doing and at the same time felt completely pointless.

But Orwell's main message is directed at his readers when this was published. He wants to set the record straight about what was really happening in Spain behind all the propaganda that was being published in the papers back home. The misinformation war is nothing new and this is one of the earliest examples - as the Stalinist faction in the forces fighting against Franco's fascist uprising gradually took control and saw the liquidation of their political enemies on their own side was of prime importance. 

As they took control, the Stalinists perpetrated various untruths about their erstwhile allies while imprisoning and disappearing many of them. Orwell had been attached to an 'anarchist' militia unit and suddenly found himself regarded as a traitor and an enemy. Fortunately he was able to escape alongside his wife who was also in the country, while many of his comrades in arms were caught by the secret police and thrown in prison. 

Orwell's fury at the betrayal of what he considered to be a genuine egalitarian socialist revolution that he saw when he first arrived in Spain is palpable. He is unequivocal in blaming the Soviet Union and their agents for this and grieves for the opportunity that the ordinary Spanish peasants and workers had taken away from them because the Soviets deemed it expedient to discourage, and then suppress, an actual revolution. 

There are lighter moments, and the usual one sentence observations that cleverly summarise an injustice or political worldview. Orwell is good at picking almost farcical elements in stories that make them memorable - whether that's the inefficiency of the Spanish secret police turning over his wife's hotel room in Barcelona, or his account of taking a sniper bullet through his throat and what he thought about his 'final thoughts' when he assumed he was done for. The short conclusion to the book after leaving Spain ends with a prescient vision of sleepy England being rudely awoken by war.

Homage to Catalonia has been critiqued several times by historians. Some of Orwell's account lacks veracity. But that's easy to say from the safety of the 21st century, with Franco safely long-dead and Stalinism a distant, unstudied memory. Orwell acknowledges his own biases and invites the reader to consider their own. He has the advantage over most of his critics because he was actually there. At times his descriptions are vivid enough to make me feel like I was too. 

Categorising "speculative" fiction

I was in a recent conversation about what classed as 'speculative fiction' and how it was different to science fiction. This followed an observation that when established authors decide to write stories set in the future they prefer to describe it as speculative fiction rather than science fiction. 

To me there is a difference. Speculating on how the world might turn out doesn't necessarily relate to changes in our scientific understanding of the world, which is a cornerstone of science fiction, nor does it depend on the ability of humans to deploy science to push back boundaries.

There was also a question of alternate history (alt-hist), which is also 'speculative', but that seems quite clearly defined already so we can save the term 'speculative' to apply to stories of a possible future instead of a different version of now. 

A suitably spacey photo...

I also divvy up sci-fi into science fiction and space fantasy (also occasionally called 'space opera'). This roughly follows the rules of 'hard' and 'soft' science fiction, although I'm not keen on those distinctions. They are dated and don't really capture the intersections of scientific progress.

The old rule used to be that 'hard' science-fiction bent or changed one rule of science, while in 'soft' science-fiction, pretty much anything goes. Keeping the former as science fiction, I'd describe space fantasy as advanced technologies separated by vast time periods from our present, or unconnected to current human history at all, like the Star Wars films being set 'a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away'. 

Here are some examples of books I've read in the four rough categories...

Alt-hist - changes details in the past to create a different set of events, or a different contemporary reality. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth explores how the USA could have adopted Nazi ideology in the 1930s. I'd also include Jasper Fforde's books about Thursday Next here and any other books about a world that looks a bit like ours but is different in some way.

Speculative fiction - starts (broadly) with where we are now and predicts what might happen in the future. This can drift towards science fiction when something novel is introduced (like triffids, for example) but the emphasis is always on the human side of things rather than the technology. Well known examples would be The Handmaid's Tale, or Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World (in a previous generation). JG Ballard's books The Drowned World and The Drought fit more here rather than in science fiction.

Science fiction - stories that revolve around or focus on a particular discovery, advance in knowledge or change in technology. 2001: A Space Odyssey and I, Robot fit here because humans discover or introduce something that changes the world. I feel this is getting rarer as a genre in terms of new releases. However, the Expanse novel series is a good example of how this genre can still produce new compelling stories.

Space Fantasy - examples would be Dune by Frank Herbert, the Culture novels by Iain M Banks, novels set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, and several of Alastair Reynolds's books. I enjoyed reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's books Children of Time and Children of Ruin, and both of those belong in this category. 

These are just my own categories and I'm probably inconsistent. But then I'm only classifying books for my own enjoyment, so it probably doesn't matter which category books end up in. 

May 2021 End of Month review

Yes, it's my monthly review of the month just gone, which serves as a both an online journal and an announcement that I'm still alive. The pandemic seems to have abated somewhat and places are opening up. However, attending a football match is still off-limits in Wales (unless your team plays in the English system) so I wasn't able to go to Barry Town's final game of the season - the post-season play-off for a Europa League qualifying place.

This actually marked the first time where I really disagreed with the restrictions. 150 people were allowed in the Barry Town clubhouse to watch the game live on TV, but none of them were allowed to go outside and stand on the terraces to watch the game. I have been supportive of the rules restricting movement throughout the pandemic, but this just felt arbitrary and stupid. 

But anyway, that's enough about what I didn't do in May. What about the things I did do? Well, the month kicked off with an election. Here we are outside our local gorsaf bleidleisio, having voted. 

The election returned more than expected Labour Senedd Members, with enough to form a workable government. I blogged about the result here. There was a shift away from the more reactionary right wing parties, which either indicates a decline in popularity for that sort of politics, or that the Conservative Party has regained the support from that wing of society. (I think it's more the latter.) 

One additional aspect to the new Government is that there was a reshuffle in the cabinet and we have a new health minister. It's not yet apparent whether that will mean any changes in health policy, or knock-on effects for the NHS, but at least it means that things that have been on hiatus for ages can progress now. 

We also made the most of easing travel restrictions to visit family, including timing a visit to Shrewsbury to see my sister and family for the first time since Christmas 2019. My twin niece and nephew were 6 on the day we saw them - we hadn't seen them the entirety of the year they were 5!

Due to the changeable weather we had to shelter under some gazebos, but at least that meant we got a pic!

I also showed off some of me back garden football skillz in true 'cool uncle' style. 

No children were harmed in the displaying
of these skillz

The second time we went up, we actually stayed the night. It was the weekend when it would have been my dad's birthday on the Sunday. It was nice to be with mum and the rest of the family for most of that day. We also had a little walk out to a nearby pool, where we saw a gazillion tadpoles.

I have almost stopped reading anything during the pandemic, but I did finish one book in May. It's a very short collection of op-ed pieces by George Orwell.

As ever with Orwell's take on contemporary issues, there are several pithy comments, many of which resonated with me. I'm planning to get around to blogging some of them soon.

I'm still writing, though. This month marked the one year anniversary of my blogging project about baseball cards. 

In an exciting development I sampled McVitie's latest foray into different flavoured jaffa cakes. Personally I didn't like these as much as some of the flavours I tried earlier in the year. But I did like the purple-hued packaging.

And that wasn't the only exciting purchase I made. Right at the end of the month, Cathy and I called into the newly reopened Firestorm Games and I bought something I'm very excited about. But that's going to wait for a post all to itself!

My 2016 book reviews list

This is my last review for 2016. Last year I split the books I'd read in 2015 across three posts. I've decided not to do that this time around, even though this will end up as a long post! I have split it into fiction (with comic books and children's fiction separate) and non-fiction. Just scroll down for non-fiction if you have no interest in fiction. I've also listed them in the order I finished them.

Fiction books 

Burmese Days - George Orwell ~ based on his real-life experiences growing up in Burma during British imperial occupation, this is ahead of its time in showing the brutal racism that underpinned British attitudes to the subject races of the Empire. It also included this funny extract about the Bible.

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ~ exceedingly long Russian classic that took me a couple of years to finish. My reading of it was not helped by how deeply unsympathetic Anna Karenina is as a character. You can read a full review of just how much I disliked this book here.

Player One - Douglas Coupland ~ four strangers are trapped in an airport bar as the world comes to an abrupt, apocalyptic end. I noticed several ideas were recycled from other Coupland books, sometimes verbatim. Then I discovered this novel was actually his contribution to a famous lecture series so I can't really blame him for cutting a few corners. Still, not his best work. The most interesting character in this is a girl with autism who breeds laboratory mice for a living and her interaction with the world and self-awareness about how she interacts differently is well captured.

Generation A - Douglas Coupland ~ after bees go 'extinct', five random strangers across the world are stung and become the centre of government attempts to solve the riddle of the bees. The five are detained under the watchful eye of a crazy scientist who believes the link is in the power of story-telling. It's a bit of a weird one, even by Coupland's standards but reasonably enjoyable.

The Gates - John Connolly ~ this is a young adult novel about Samuel, a young teenage boy who discovers his neighbours are messing around with the occult and have accidentally opened "the gates" that allow demons through from hell into the real world. Of course no adults believe Samuel so it is up to him and his mates to save the world. Some of the demonic carnage is surprisingly gruesome.

Dragonflight - Anne McCaffrey ~ fantasy story about a world where dragons are used to combat interplanetary spores that will destroy all life. It had a plot device that I worked out long before the characters did. There's an awful lot of conversations about events rather than describing the action, which makes it feel dated. It's also clear that other authors (like Naomi Novik) owe a huge debt to the ideas in this book.

The Player of Games - Iain M. Banks ~ the second Culture novel, centering on a representative of the Culture being commissioned to visit the Empire of Azad and play the famous Game of Azad that determines who will become Emperor. I had read this before 13 years ago and was surprised how many key scenes in the story I remembered, I felt I got more out of it on the second reading and it was interesting to see how advanced Banks' ideas about the Culture were so early on in the series.

Fangland - John Marks ~ creepy horror that borrows heavily from Dracula and other vampire lore. Evangeline Harker works for a TV news channel and travels to Transylvania to interview a crime lord who turns out to be a darker monster that feeds off the memories of murder victims. The monster wants to travel to New York because it's attracted to the energy unleashed from the ruins of the World Trade Centre (this was published in 2007 not long after 9/11). I don't usually read horror and was misled slightly by the quirky cover that promised more humour in the story.

Complicity - Iain Banks ~ a newspaper columnist is framed for a series of grisly murders, and it looks bad for him because all the victims are people he had named in one of his columns as people who deserved to have some street justice meted out to them. He has to find the real killer before the police decide the circumstantial evidence is too great to ignore. There's a lot of sex and bloody violence in the story, both of which stray into being uncomfortably graphic.

The Girl with all the Gifts ~ M.R. Carey - science fiction post-apocalyptic zombie story that I think was probably my book of the year. Melanie is a child held in a secure education institution who begins to realise she is not a normal girl like the ones she reads about in books. The world outside is not as the books say as well, with the human population under threat from zombie cannibals, known as 'hungries'. When hungries overwhelm the institution, Melanie and some human protectors try to reach Beacon, the last outpost of humanity. But first they have to cross a hungry-infested London. The cause of the 'hungry' outbreak is based on a process found in nature. The book itself is gripping, I kept finding myself wanting to pick it up at breakfast to find out what happened next, and it was difficult to put it down. The characters are all very believable, despite the questionable premise.

When They Come from Space - Mark Clifton ~ 1960s science fiction that is more of a pastiche of political bureaucracy. Ralph Kennedy, a psychologist, is drafted by mistake into the space navy just before aliens make contact with humans. There was some humour and the lampooning of media barons was entertaining, but the story wasn't particularly thrilling.

Children's fiction

The Wombles to the Rescue - Elisabeth Beresford ~ the Wombles need to meet their fellow Wombles from around the world to deal with the great oil crisis (this was written in the 70s). While Great Uncle Bulgaria heads to the International Womble Conference in the USA, Tobermory solves the problem with a synthetic replacement, showing the Wombles were light years ahead of human green tech solutions. The story is oddly paced and there are no scenes at the conference or in America, which seems like a missed opportunity to widen the world of the Wombles a bit and show us what American ones are like.

Noggin the King - Oliver Postgate & Peter Firmin ~ short story book about Noggin the Nog (70s kids TV character). As king, Noggin feels a responsibility to care for his people, but he doesn't know if he is also king of the birds and whether he should be caring for them, so he goes with Queen Nooka into the forest to find out. The story really comes second to the lovely illustrations.

Comic books (or graphic novels)

Halo & Sprockett: Welcome to Humanity - Kerry Callan ~ entertaining collection of comic strips about an angel (Halo) and a robot (Sprockett) who are living with a young woman called Katie, and are trying to understand human beings. There's a lot of heart to the book and I found it very amusing.

Serenity: Better Days ~ the Serenity crew (from the TV series Firefly) come into money in a heist but then lose it again, possibly because Mal is afraid his crew are going to split up now they are rich. We also learn that first mate Zoe was a 'dust devil' terrorist who kept on fighting after the war ended.

Serenity: The Shepherd's Tale ~ it turns out Shepherd Book is not a holy man at all. As his story is told in reverse his links to the Alliance forces are revealed, but as the story goes back further more secrets about his origins tell a very different story. I wasn't sure I liked the deconstruction of the character this way or finding out who he really was, but the story was well told.

Non-fiction books

Shopping in Jail - Douglas Coupland ~ a collection of essays, including a reflection on Generation X, twenty years later. Some of his thoughts about how humans and technology could merge in the future and the development of alternate copies of human minds (stored doppelgangers or 'cloud-gangers') were thought-provoking. He had a good line about how in the past there were movements (like surrealism) that lasted decades, but now we have memes that only last a few days.

66: The World Cup in Real Time - Ian Passingham ~ I was sent this reportage style review of England's 1966 World Cup victory to review for When Saturday Comes. I thought it was an interesting way to tell a story that has been told many times before. (Published review here)

The Boy Who Wanted to Fly - Don Mullan ~ weird hagiography written by a peace campaigner in Northern Ireland whose hero was England goalkeeper Gordon Banks. I like books about goalkeepers so picked it up to add to my collection. Don's own experiences - he was a witness to the events of Bloody Sunday - are glossed over in favour of repeating the mantra that if more people were like Gordon Banks the world would be a better place.

Godless Morality - Richard Holloway ~ a thoughtful book about constructing a moral framework without the problematic issue of saying 'this is what God wants'.  Read my longer review here

Nothing - various authors ~ a collection of essays published by New Scientist on the concept of 'nothing'. From studies of what elements do when reduced to absolute zero, through to patterns in the unconscious brain, through to the development of the concept of zero as a number, this is a bit of a mixed bag and some of the essays were too similar. But there were lots of things to think about.

Marshall McLuhan - Douglas Coupland ~ unorthodox biography, notable for being Douglas Coupland's first attempt at writing a book like this. It tells McLuhan's story well, as a misunderstood predictor of the Internet age who hated technology. McLuhan is eminently quotable but only if the quotes are taken out of context. Coupland weaves in his own connections with McLuhan into the narrative, for example, taking a photo of McLuhan's grave for a fax advertising campaign in the 80s, and while this is odd in a biography it kind of works in a fitting tribute to a man whose view of the world defied convention and divided opinion in his lifetime.

God is Watching You - Dominic Johnson ~ an interesting blend of psychology and evolutionary theory that suggests supernatural beliefs about divine punishment offered an evolutionary advantage to social groups as humanity emerged. The theory suggests this has produced human beings who are hardwired to believe in supernatural agents. Controversially, this may mean society may only function optimally if people are afraid of incurring the wrath of supernatural agents. The main points of the theory are backed up by experimental research findings, but it got a bit repetitive, as if the author was trying to stretch a few papers out into a book.

How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World - Francis Wheen ~ a collection of angry essays targeting 'nonsense'. Post-modernism comes in for a hammering, as do trickle-down economics, the Left's support for radical Islam, the cult of Princess Diana, conspiracy theorists, and rapid globalisation that destroys economies in developing countries. This book was published in 2004 and could do with being updated in the light of ISIS and the post-truth politics and lies of the Brexiteers and Donald Trump.

Interim bookey post - an extract from Burmese Days by George Orwell

The other reviews are coming soon. In the meantime, I've finished my first book for 2016: Burmese Days by George Orwell. It's a novel set in Burma during the British Empire. This bit amused me highly.

An hour passed, and a melancholy, earth-coloured Indian loitered up the drive, dressed in a loin-cloth and a salmon-pink pagri on which a washing-basket was balanced. He laid down his basket and salaamed to Flory. 

‘Who are you?’ 

‘Book-wallah, sahib.’ 

The book-wallah was an itinerant peddler of books who wandered from station to station throughout Upper Burma. His system of exchange was that for any book in his bundle you gave him four annas, and any other book. Not quite any book, however, for the book-wallah, though analphabetic, had learned to recognize and refuse a Bible. 

‘No, sahib,’ he would say plaintively, ‘no. This book (he would turn it over disapprovingly in his flat brown hands) this book with a black cover and gold letters—this one I cannot take. I know not how it is, but all sahibs are offering me this book, and none are taking it. What can it be that is in this black book? Some evil, undoubtedly.’

My five star books

Since 2002 I have been noting the books I read and giving them a review of between one and five stars. A bit sad, I know, but it’s helpful when I can’t remember whether a book was any good or not.

Anyway, here’s a list of the books I’ve given five stars to. I was a bit surprised at some of the ones on this list. Obviously I really liked them at the time. I’m not sure I’d rate them all so highly if I read them now. That shows how subjective this is. I’m also interested by what is not on there – no J.D. Salinger, for example.

God’s Debris – Scott Adams
Stupid White Men – Michael Moore
The Silmarillion – J.R.R. Tolkien
The River of Time – David Brin
The Incarnation – St Athanasius
Sabriel – Garth Nix
Becoming Fully Human – Patrick Whitworth
Lirael – Garth Nix
How to Read the Bible for all it’s Worth – Gordon Fee
Paul, the Spirit and the People of God – Gordon Fee
Abhorsen – Garth Nix
A New Kind of Christian – Brian D. McLaren
A Theology of the Dark Side – Nigel G. Wright
Possession – A.S. Byatt
Velvet Elvis – Rob Bell
Use of Weapons – Iain M. Banks
Nineteen Eighty-four – George Orwell
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde
The Road to Wigan Pier – George Orwell
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Surface Detail – Iain M. Banks
Wonder – R.J. Palacio
The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
Ragnarok – A.S. Byatt
Generation X – Douglas Coupland
Wise Children – Angela Carter

I’ve noticed that as time has progressed I’ve stopped rating Christian books so highly. I’ve also started reading more well-known authors, which is probably the influence of my book group. But I’ve awarded fewer five star ratings as time has gone on, so I’ve given F. Scott Fitzgerald, Salinger, Solzhenitsyn and others four or four and a half star ratings, where a few years earlier they would probably have got a five. (This also explains why Stupid White Men is in this list. I don’t think I’d give that a five now.)

A writer's legacy

Occasionally people ask me how I got to write for a living. Sheer luck (or divine providence if you don't believe in luck). Sometimes I'm asked how a person could become a writer. I always say 'read books'. Ask a writer what they're currently reading and you'll usually get a list as long as their arm (and only because you can't really carry a pile of books longer than your arm). And it's fairly obvious that people who don't read won't know what works and what doesn't.

My dream is to write more of what I want to write for a living. But I recognise I am lucky in getting to do something like what I want to do. Still we all daydream, don't we.

Thinking about other writers I admire, one of them is George Orwell. A mark of a writer's achievement is the impression you make on the language - in other words your legacy. Orwell managed that with one book: 1984.

I read 1984 when I was about 15 and it remains one of the most affecting books I've ever read. And when you think about the linguistic legacy of the book, you can see how I'm not alone in that. The very title is frequently used to describe a sinister governmental state of affairs: "It's like something out of 1984". The term 'Orwellian' is used exclusively for a dystopic view of the future, or a pessimism about society, based on 1984 (and possibly Animal Farm, to be fair), but not for any of his other stuff.

And of course, Big Brother. Inescapable at the moment in terms of TV, but also in terms of CCTV. There are 20 million CCTV cameras in the world and 4 million of them are in Britain. That's one camera for every 14 people. 20% of the world's CCTV footage is of me and my fellow Brits going around our daily business. (And worryingly, the Big Brother who watches us doesn't stop people blowing themselves up on the underground or ramraiding airports. No wonder the conspiracy theorists conclude the government is in on it.)

At least one other TV show takes it's name from 1984: Room 101. It takes a certain kind of genius to take the fabled torture room where you are made to face your worst fears and turn it into light televisual entertainment. But I think Orwell would have enjoyed the irony. And it was quite a decent show, even if the first presenter was replaced with no explanations. (It's just like something out of 1984.)

And try and read a quality newspaper (or even the Daily Mail) for a week without running across the phrases 'thought police' or 'doublethink' (the art of holding two contradictory viewpoints at the same time).

So the big question is, did naming these concepts so many years ago mean they couldn't insidiously develop. What George Orwell gave the world was epithets to describe the erosion of civil liberties and government duplicity. When his labels are applied to circumstances, it reveals them for what they are. Is his legacy really the freedom to name and shame tyranny?