I've got to find the time to sit down and actually give my attention this book. My copy was given to me by Dorothy Day upon the occasion of my twenty-second birthday, where she noted "I read and enjoyed this so much. I wanted you to have it." An author could not have hoped for nor received a better endorsement.

Delightful. Orwell is a principled thinker and a clear writer. He was not of his age but was able to extract himself from it and think rationally. In the first page of his essay on Rudyard Kipling, for example, Orwell calls Kipling a racist. He does not dance around the point. His humility and empathy for others shines through: he actually went into the coal mines to experience the dreadful working conditions of 1930s miners; he fought in the Spanish revolution, but admitted that most of his war experience was just dreariness, cold, and meager rations . He believed in a more egalitarian society but called out the lazy thinking of the left. It is a shame he lived such a short life. He was still going strong when he died.

I recommend "Write What I Please," "Shooting the Elephant," and "A Hanging."

Personally, I will continue to re-read these essays. Orwell is a great teacher in the creative nonfiction art.

I'm always seeing others provide thought-provoking quotes from Orwell's writings (other than Animal Farm and 1984). So I thought I would see for myself what the man has to say.

I quit reading this, not because I didn't like it, but because I kept misplacing it and I hate re-re-renewing library books. I hope to read more Orwell some time in the future, but I'll buy my own copy when I do.

The author of On Tyranny recommended one of the essays in this collection of Orwellian works, and I ended up reading about half of the collection. Published in 1984, the volume appears to be a rather random pile of Orwell's works thrown together for the occasion of celebrating '1984', by far Orwell's most famous work (and already rated elsewhere by this Goodread-er). The editor included bits and pieces of many novels, as well as reportage, literary criticism, and short essays. I but skimmed the novel extracts, but I did read the short pieces with relish. Orwell is a good clean writer, and a persistent and eloquent defender of liberalism (with a dash of socialism). I can see why the On Tyranny author recommended him.

A must read for all far thinkers out there.

In the place of the essay "The Sporting Spirit".

Some authors seem so close in temperament and world view to yourself that it's as though they were writing directly to you, speaking to a part of you that you never even realized could be written about at all, much less in such a clear and resonant way. That's what reading this book was like for me.

My previous exposure to Orwell was reading Animal Farm in middle school (which I remember nothing about except that it had evil pigs and was an allegory of something or other) and 1984, which I read for the first time just a year or so ago and loved. I originally bought this collection of Orwell's writing just to get access to one particular essay of his that I couldn't find anywhere else -- Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool. I decided to start reading the whole book and see if I liked it, and if not, I could always just skip to the essay I wanted. But once I started, I had no desire to stop.

I never knew before how rich and full Orwell's life was. He seems to have done more in his 47 years than most people can accomplish in the typical 75-year life expectancy. The essays and stories in this book give you a vivid picture of the different stages of his life: his time as an unhappy boy at a strict boarding school, his time working in the British Indian army under the colonial system, his experiment with crushing poverty and working-class life in Paris and London, his time as a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, his stint as a journalist reporting on working conditions in British coal mines...it goes on. The essay I had originally been looking for was excellent not only in the category of Shakespearean scholarship, but also in the class of nonfiction concerned with providing masterly rebuttals to someone else's stupidity (in this case, Tolstoy's).

Orwell's writing is also amazingly clear and unpretentious. Even when writing about traditionally obscure subjects like the meaning of King Lear, he always makes things as simple as possible, but no simpler. It's like a breath of fresh air for those of us used to dragging ourselves through sentences that have about as much flow as a mud pit (especially "business-ese," which Orwell attacks perfectly in one of the essays).

Every essay in this book is worth reading. I can't even begin to list all my favorite quotes from these pages. I personally have no idea how I made it through years of high school English classes and an entire Bachelor's degree in English without having read more Orwell -- his writing is better, more important, and more interesting than that of just about any other author I can remember reading in high school or college. If I had my way, I'd scrap Animal Farm from the curriculum and have English students read this collection of his writings instead.

I'll just limit myself to one quote:

"The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition -- in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all -- and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class."

George Orwell, from Why I Write, 1947

456 pages. Donated 2010 May.

Here is Orwell’s work in all its remarkable range and variety. The selections in this anthology show how Orwell developed as writer and as thinker; inevitably, too, they reflect and illuminate the history of the time of troubles in which he lived and worked. “A magnificent tribute to the probity, consistency and insight of Orwell’s topical writings” (Alfred Kazin). Introduction by Richard H. Rovere.

Contents include:
Prologue in Burma - Shooting an Elephant; A Hanging; (excerpt) Burmese Days
The Thirties - (excerpt) Down and Out in Paris and London; How the Poor Die, ...
World War II and After - ...; Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool; In Defense of P.G. Wodehouse; ...; Why I Write ...

You get the idea ...

The man could write essays. A lost art, and Orwell was probably the best. Fantastic read, highly recommended.

This is my most re-read book I own. I always come back to this one.

Orwell writes the way I wish I could, and as long as I have this book I'll keep striving.

Bought it as a required text for Crafting the Personal Essay course.

A great collection of fiction, non-fiction, essays, and critiques. Orwell was quite an amazing thinker.