Oh no, I am halfway there. Already. I wonder if, this Bookathon is keeping me out of trouble or landing me more in it. I have an inkling that some people don't like others who read too much. We could actually be up to something while turning those pages. Our brains are firing. This makes world takeover by the Zombie apocalypse near impossible, because our brains are already in use. They'll only pick on the mindless people who watch tv instead.
Today's letter is O and I have to pick George Orwell.
I can say I read the same story my mum read in school because she had a copy of Animal Farm too, and kept it. Later on in Form 5 I remember it being an assigned text for School Certificate. However most of our class didn't know it was about the Communist regime because none of us had ever lived in a place that had one. Most thought it was a tale about a farm, not unlike Charlotte's Web. We all cried when *spoiler* Boxer got sent to the knackers.
There WAS a regime at school however, it was quite clear that the grown ups were in power and the students were not. We didn't have slogans like 'Four legs bad, two legs good' though. We just had 'the Massey Way' which I recall was 'Keep your hands, legs, feet and objects to yourself' . In other words, no touching, sharing or holding hands, or kicking each other. It didn't say anything about kissing. However this only lasted about five years because after that your time was up and you were free to leave and kiss whoever you liked.
I also read 1984 about this time too, when I was 14 and it was 1994. It was not an assigned text, but I was curious to read it. This was before the tv show Big Brother and smartphones and webcams and blogging and internet. The world it described was rather upside down, but I was also getting used to political correctness. Then the Sky Tower went up around 1996 so, we now had our very own surveillance for Auckland. Everything in the novel was becoming true. Scary! Maybe our tvs would start watching us instead of the other way round. Well now they do, it's called Zoom.
George Orwell wasn't bothered because back in 1948 when he wrote it the world was already a scary place, and he'd been through several wars. It just seemed the twentieth century was the most bloody yet, and he didn't think it would get any better. He was the original investigative gonzo journalist though, and I do recommend reading his other books, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia, and my favourite Down and out in Paris and London, in which he chronicled his life working as a dishwasher in those dirty rat infested restaurants. Anthony Bourdain would later do a similar thing with his memoir Kitchen Confidential, but then he was an actual executive chef working in NYC, whereas George Orwell was just slumming it and was always going to be a writer.
Back then, the working class people (in his words, 'the proles') just did not write books. Firstly they didn't have the time, and secondly, they didn't have the education to read and write, and thirdly who would publish them anyway. Orwell wrote a famous essay called 'Why I write' in which he wrote his reasons, most often political, and then one about the craft of writing in which he wrote 'Good prose should be like a window pane'. I've never forgotten it. If ever the 20th century needed an author, George Orwell was going to be the one who wrote Truth to Power, as back then power was like a big jackboot crushing and silencing the little people.
The ironic thing was later on George Orwell repented of his polemic and claimed he wanted a quiet life tending roses in his garden. However I am glad he wrote all these books for us to read instead of Gardening with Old Roses.
Join me in The Great Kiwi Bookathon, and I would recommend reading Animal Farm out loud, it's a great story.
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