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Recent reading
Dec. 1st, 2004 12:10 amFar too much of my reading material is SF and fantasy, so I’ve been making an effort to read outside the genre recently. Some recent reading:
Dime’s Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils ed. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
“Edited” is the wrong word; “compiled” is more accurate. This is a series of essays of widely varying quality claiming that there isn’t enough difference between the Democratic and Republican parties to get worked up over. The best of these (mostly the ones about individual people) made me wish I had a net connection handy so I could do some fact-checking. (Maybe one day I’ll do that and write a followup.) The worst (Brandy Baker’s “Women and the Democratic Party” was the absolute bottom) were such obvious hack-work that I feel no qualms disregarding them out of hand.
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
It says “fiction” on the back, but it reads like autobiography. It’s written in the first person by an unnamed narrator, and clearly draws extensively on Orwell’s own experiences living in poverty. The Paris part is best for its portrayal of life behind the scenes of a fancy hotel (where our narrator briefly works as a dishwasher); the London part for its depiction of the misery of tramp life.
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
(Not quite finished with this yet.) This one is both autobiography and history, yet Barnes & Noble shelved it under Fiction (because how many people look for anything by Orwell but 1984 or Animal Farm?). Orwell tells of his experiences as a volunteer militiaman fighting for the republican government (well, not so much for them as against the Fascist nationalists) in the Spanish Civil War. He spent some time on the front, as well as being on the scene for the street fighting in Barcelona in May 1937. He devotes a lot of space to describing his experiences in Barcelona, and how they differ from the official reports in the press, and to the leftist infighting behind this. With lots of acronyms. Even if you can’t keep all the different groups straight, his general point (that the Communists betrayed the anarchists and trade unionists) comes through.
Sock by Penn Jillette
This is next in line after Catalonia. A gonzo buddy cop story narrated by a sock monkey. I’m looking forward to it.
Dime’s Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils ed. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
“Edited” is the wrong word; “compiled” is more accurate. This is a series of essays of widely varying quality claiming that there isn’t enough difference between the Democratic and Republican parties to get worked up over. The best of these (mostly the ones about individual people) made me wish I had a net connection handy so I could do some fact-checking. (Maybe one day I’ll do that and write a followup.) The worst (Brandy Baker’s “Women and the Democratic Party” was the absolute bottom) were such obvious hack-work that I feel no qualms disregarding them out of hand.
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
It says “fiction” on the back, but it reads like autobiography. It’s written in the first person by an unnamed narrator, and clearly draws extensively on Orwell’s own experiences living in poverty. The Paris part is best for its portrayal of life behind the scenes of a fancy hotel (where our narrator briefly works as a dishwasher); the London part for its depiction of the misery of tramp life.
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
(Not quite finished with this yet.) This one is both autobiography and history, yet Barnes & Noble shelved it under Fiction (because how many people look for anything by Orwell but 1984 or Animal Farm?). Orwell tells of his experiences as a volunteer militiaman fighting for the republican government (well, not so much for them as against the Fascist nationalists) in the Spanish Civil War. He spent some time on the front, as well as being on the scene for the street fighting in Barcelona in May 1937. He devotes a lot of space to describing his experiences in Barcelona, and how they differ from the official reports in the press, and to the leftist infighting behind this. With lots of acronyms. Even if you can’t keep all the different groups straight, his general point (that the Communists betrayed the anarchists and trade unionists) comes through.
Sock by Penn Jillette
This is next in line after Catalonia. A gonzo buddy cop story narrated by a sock monkey. I’m looking forward to it.
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