Still reeling from the mastery of Orwell's essays: "Shooting and Elephant and other essays". That book is a masterpiece. The title piece is perhaps the most famous followed by "Politics and the English language", and "The Hanging" . There are what at first glance appear to be rather whimsical pieces such as "In Praise of the Common Toad" and "In Defense of English Cooking", but which are about much larger issues.
This quote by James Wood was particularly insightful:
So Orwell was contradictory: contradictions are what makes writers interesting, consistency is for cooking
James Wood essay on Orwell.
I found the copy gathering dust on one of the shelves at Manney's. Of course, no other bookstore in town had the book.
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