Get Your Copy Books V. Cigarettes Planned By George Orwell Released Through Digital Paper

child which appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering horrors which it cannot or will not reveal,” George Orwell, Such, Such Were The Joys

I should do a George Orwell month, where I read nothing else.
Honestly, I love his writing so much fiction or essays, no matter,

This edition of mine includes the following essays: Books v, Cigarettes, Bookshop Memories, Confessions of a Book er, The Prevention of Literature, My Country Left or Right, How The Poor Die and Such, Such Were The Joys.
Every single one is interesting, The first, for instance, points out how the people who say they have no money to spend on books often would spend quite a lot on cigarettes and beer, the second has anecdotes and observations from his time working in a secondhand bookstore.
I loved how personal most of these were, especially the last Such, Such Were the Joys, which was basically a minibiography of his childhood years.


It is written with the wit and wonderful turn of phrase Orwell naturally possesses, and it is a wonderful insight into his mind.
For some reason during this I felt much the same as when I read Dahls Going Solo, Maybe its because two writers I admire writing about their childhood and not making a dogs dinner of it, but I will definitely treasure this book.
کتاب مجموعهای از شش مقاله است که با دیدی طنز از دید یک کتابخوان یک کتابفروش و یک منتقد در زمینهی کتابخوانی و کتابفروشی و مسائل آموزشی نوشته شده است. به طور کلی کتاب جالبی بود و واقعا از اورول نگارش همچین کتابی دور از انتظار نبود. فصل آخر برای من خیلی جالب و مفید بود. در مورد مدارس انگلستان و خاطرات مدرسه و اینکه چرا گاهی مدارس به بدترین مکان برای بچهها تبدیل میشوند پرداخته بود.

Parfois, certains livres nous font voyager dans nos souvenirs simplement en les regardant: c'est le cas de celuilà, J'ai l'ai acheté dans une librairie hippie de l'île de Waieheke, en face de Auckland en NouvelleZélande un pays superbe dont la nature est une des plus amènes en ces terres australes.
Làbas, c'était l'été, Ils étaient plutôt bon marché, et assez maigres pour vaincre mon appréhension, Je voulais améliorer mon anglais étique, mais il fallait faire attention, Làbas, aux antipodes, les francophones sont regardés avec méfiance depuis le funeste attentat du Rainbow Warrior,

Ça n'a pas raté: la libraire, visiblement heureuse de trouver une oreille où verser des reproches vigoureux et exhaler un courroux indigné, m'avait soumis à un long interrogatoire inquisiteur auquel je me suis prêté de mauvais gré, pour sonder mes sentiments et mes opinions sur un sujet délicat.
Elle finit par médifier par une longue tirade brûlante de vertu et de droiture, mais peutêtre pas aussi éclairée que j'aurais souhaité pour oser y répondre franchement.
De toute façon, aucune réplique n'était attendue: il fallait entendre en faisant mine d'écouter, il fallait faire preuve de résipiscence.


Enfin, tout ce que j'aurais su répliquer dans la langue de Molière serait devenu des pauvretés si j'avais voulu les transporter dans celle de Shakespear.
J'étais malheureux. Beaucoup de politique, de caresses et peutêtre quelques mensonges pour ne pas envenimer la situation m'ont finalement tiré de ce mauvais pas.
L'âme pleine de doutes et de réflexions, j'ai acheté des cigarettes, et puis je suis parti lire sur la plage d'Oneroa pour chasser mes préoccupations et me consacrer à la lecture.
J'ai encore envie d'y retourner, . .

Lately, stronger than before, I have realized and felt how much an exciting pastime is the ability and the possibility to read.
Not necessarily that, as per Orwell's challenging business analysis, reading proves to be one of the cheaper recreations just in case I cant afford other luxuries but mostly because it keeps me, more than ever, on the surviving limit of the overall mental sanity.
Without books some things would be extremely tedious, hollow, devastatingly boring and uninteresting,
This collection of essays 'Books v, cigarettes' is very entertaining, exploring various themes, more or less of actual significance, too,
Such, such were the Joys was the most emotional one, describing some of the early memories of Orwells childhood, during the years spent at the St Cyprian boarding school, which it turned out to have had a very strong impact on his future individual development.
The style of storytelling is so amazing that I felt connected and immersed into his inner universe as I have been his double, someone that joined him, on his child's adventures, as an external observer but of an intimate quality.


Regarding boarding schools The real question is whether it is still normal for a schoolchild to live for years amid irrational terrors and lunatic misunderstandings.
And here one is up against the very great difficulty of knowing what a child really feels and thinks, A child which appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering horrors which it cannot or will not reveal, It lives in a sort of alien underwater world which we can only penetrate by memory or divination, Our chief clue is the fact that we were once children ourselves, and many people appear to forget the atmosphere of their own childhood almost entirely.

Think for instance of the unnecessary torments that people will inflict by sending a child back to school with clothes of the wrong pattern, and refusing to see that this matters! between us, off the record, our parents always, but always, purchased clothes at leastsizes bigger than our current size.
I, especially during primary school, was looking very funny in my winter jacket: almost like a grownup that failed to reach at least an average heightof course, it was useless any outcry, my parents always telling me that there is no money to waste on changing clothes once a seasonthey were right and I accepted it as a matter of fact Over things of this kind a child will sometimes utter a protest, but a great deal of the time its attitude is one of simple concealment.
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards, Even the affection that one feels for a child, the desire to protect and cherish it, is a cause of misunderstanding, One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.
this was not true for me, as I recall that I have developed an obsessive affection towards my mother when a childsomehow I have terrorized my father, lol.
Not much changed during adult years lol,
Looking back on my own childhood, after the infant years were over, I do not believe that I ever felt love for any mature person, except my mother, and even her I did not trust, in the sense that shyness made me conceal most of my real feelings from her.
Love, the spontaneous, unqualified emotion of love, was something I could only feel for people who were young, Towards people who were oldand remember that old to a child means over thirty goodness! I am overly old by now, or even over twentyfiveI could feel reverence, respect, admiration or compunction, but I seemed cut off from them by a veil of fear and shyness mixed up with physical distaste.
People are too ready to forget the child physical shrinking from the adult, The enormous size of grownups, their ungainly, rigid bodies, their coarse, wrinkled skins, their great relaxed eyelids, their yellow teeth, and the whiffs of musty clothes and beer and sweat and tobacco that disengage from them at every movement!
Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a childs eyes, is that the child is usually looking upward, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.
Besides, being fresh and unmarked itself, the child has impossibly high standards in the matter of skin and teeth and complexion, But the greatest barrier of all is the childs misconception about age, A child can hardly envisage life beyond thirty, and in judging peoples ages it will make fantastic mistakes, It will think that a person ofis, that a person ofis, and so on, And the child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself, All who have passed the age ofare joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for.
Only child life is real life,
I base these generalizations on what I can recall of my own childhood

outlook, Treacherous though memory is, it seems to me the chief means we have of discovering how a childs mind works, Only by resurrecting our own memories can we realize how incredibly distorted is the childs vision of the world,
The child and the adult live in different worlds, If that is so, we cannot be certain that school, at any rate boarding school, is not still for many children as dreadful an experience as it used to be.
Take away God, Latin, the cane, class distinctions and sexual taboos, and the Fear, the Hatred, the Snobbery and the Misunderstanding might still all be there.

This led me to accept outrages and believe absurdities, and to suffer torments over things which were in fact of no importance.
It is not enough to say that I was silly and ought to have known better, Look back into your own childhood and think of the nonsense you used to believe and the trivialities which could make you suffer.
Of course, my own case had its individual variations, but essentially it was that of countless other boys,
The weakness of the child is that is starts with a blank sheet, It neither understands nor questions the society in which it lives, and because of its credulity other people can work upon it, infecting it with the sense of inferiority and the dread of offending against mysterious, terrible laws.
It may be that everything that happened to me at St Cyprians could happen in the most enlightened school, though perhaps in subtler forms.
Of one thing, however, I do feel fairly sure, and that is that boarding schools are worse than day schools, A child has a better chance with the sanctuary of its home near at hand, And I think the characteristic faults of the English upper and middle classes may be partly due to the practice, general until recently, of sending children away from home as young as nine, eight or even seven.


I felt highly laughable the firstessays: Books v, Cigarettes, Bookshop Memories, Confessions of a Book reviewer, while the remaining, were much more serious, argumentative and fairly challenging: The Prevention of Literature, My country right or left, How the poor die, Such, such were the Joys.
Do members of your family read How about your friends Have you ever suddenly felt in a small group, that you are the only one there who reads Many on Goodreads might recognise this scenario, and I know that for some this is their normal life.
They are the only one in their social group, family, or among their work acquaintances, who reads in their leisure time, Yet nowadays, when it is so much easier to access a huge variety of reading material whatever the circumstances, why should that be

George Orwell too wondered this, and inhe set out to discover the possible reason why.
He tells how one evening in, a friend of his who was a newspaper editor, was firewatching with some factory workers, His friend asked the workers how they liked his newspaper, Most said they liked it, but that the literary section did not interest them, as it dealt with books which cost a lot of money.


It seemed to be the accepted idea that reading was a luxury for rich people, and the less welloff could not afford it.
However, George Orwells friend commented that these men would think nothing of spending several pounds going to the seaside on a day trip.
So George Orwell decided to examine how much reading actually cost him personally, In this essay, he presents an account of his own inventory of books and their total cost, Breaking the collection down into categories, and including other related expenses such as library subscriptions and newspapers, George Orwell calculated as accurately as he could, his best estimate of how much reading had cost him over the last fifteen years.


The total figure Orwell arrived at wasa year, This is equivalent to around,today, He says it might sound a large sum but compared with other expenses it isnt much:

“With prices as they now are, I am spending far more on tobacco than I do on books.
”

For instance the money that he now spent on reading matter could only buy someonecigarettes a week, He then calculates his expenditure on alcohol and cigarettes over the year, and makes it aroundabout,today, and works out in detail that the national average spending on alcohol and cigarette is about the same.
George Orwell reminds us that a few years earlier, before the war, people could buycigarettes for the same price, but:

“all prices are now inflated, including the price of books: still, it looks as though the cost of reading, even if you buy books instead of borrowing them and take in a fairly large number of periodicals, does not amount to more than the combined cost of smoking and drinking.
”

I neither smoke nor drink, but found George Orwells choice of comparison significant, He quite deliberately selected what most factory workers would choose to spend their money on, to avoid the irrelevance of social class to reading as a pursuit.
Thus he chose working class leisure choices such as beer and cigarettes, rather than middle class fine wines and chocolates, Still though, the idea of reading being more expensive than other hobbies did not hold up,

This idea still seems to prevail, People still say they cannot afford to buy books, Another reason often given for not reading is that they “havent the time”, This seems even more extraordinary, when we consider how many more laboursaving gadgets we have in the home than in, the sharp rise of car ownership and better transport systems, plus the instant availability of a huge range of products.
We need to spend far less time on the mechanics of daily life, no longer even walking to where we need to go.
However there are far more leisure pursuits as well, and they beckon people,

Nevertheless, basic reading skills are needed for many of these leisure pursuits such as most sorts of social media, or anything on a computer.
We need to read to read rules, or instructions on how to construct something, and daily life in general, But books and even magazines seem to pose some sort of “duty” issue, Otherwise, people would not feel they have to give “excuses” such as cost, or time, They would simply say “I dont want to”, But have you ever heard anyone say that

The truth of it is, as I see it, that people who do not read for their own pleasure hold two separate ideas in their minds:

.
I think I should read,
. I dont want to read,

Allied to this, we have more reading matter available than ever before, The first point does not help anyone in fact it is more likely to reinforce the second one, as nobody likes to feel they “ought” to, or are being expected to do something.


George Orwell may not have our modern lives, but he makes an excellent case for reading, which is still relevant even now.
I am constantly surprised by the variety of groups of people who choose not to read, For instanceoryears ago I broke my leg, “spectacularly” as the paramedics said, It was the femur thigh bone and I was upstairs in a very small room, full of books, To get me downstairs on a stretcher, navigating sharp corners was challenging, and they had to call out an extra pair of paramedics.
In the meantime the ones waiting gazed at all my bookshelves, Admittedly they are full to overflowing but no, I didnt trip over a book I actually tripped over a coat hanger, Apparently stunned, one asked: “Have you read all these”

I can see you now, sagely nodding, Youve probably had it said to you this is the sort of question a nonreader might ask, But these were highly skilled professionals, with several year of study and training under their belts, How could they not be readers I cannot understand this,

Of course there are going to be times or stages of our lives when it is difficult to snatch a moment for ourselves when we have no time whatsoever for leisure.
But we do not live in theth century, working fromam topm, and even the most timechallenged person will find that one day, one year, things will ease up.
Yet how many then will reach for a book

George Orwell moves on to to consider the many benefits of reading.
His final three paragraphs begin:

“It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them.
”

Sometimes the cost can be far cheaper in the end than you had expected, For example, a dictionary you bought for “just sixpence” might be useful for no less thanyears and you can consult it any time you like.
A reference book, or a book of poetry might have a similar cost ratio, If you like buying books new, you can keep them after reading them and then sell them on at one third their original price we could use ebay.
If you buy them second hand the cost is far cheaper, or if you borrow them from a library, then it costs you next to nothing.


The type of book feeds into this cost factor too, Perhaps our “reluctant readers” might go shiftyeyed at this point, Is there a difference in what we “ought” to read, Again, we are opening a can of worms, Parents sometimes castigate their children for reading books that are too easy, or formulaic, or disparage their teenagers for reading “trash”, Other, nonreading parents may be equally dismissive of academic, or more serious literary books, feeling that they are a “waste of time” and not relevant to the here and now.


There are an infinite variety of books:

“There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of ones mind and alter ones whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later: and the cost, in terms of money, may be the same in each case.
”

George Orwell decides to make his comparison by restricting the choice to popular novels, and works out that if you spend about four hours reading a light novel, this is:

“about what it costs to sit in one of the more expensive seats in the cinema.
If you concentrated on more serious books, and still bought everything that you read, your expenses would be about the same, The books would cost more but they would take longer to read, In either case you would still possess the books after you had read them, ”

With our plethora of alternative entertainments, we can do our own comparisons with the latest gadgets, I cannot make the detailed comparisons George Orwell does for his own time, as I personally have very few leisure gadgets, and can only access the internet on a laptop.
However, it is clear how expensive they all are, and how they have to be updated or replaced frighteningly often, He concludes:

“I have said enough to show that reading is one of the cheaper recreations: after listening to the radio probably THE cheapest.
”

We can add in the television to this, but there are financial drawbacks such as builtin obsolescence to the other latest technological marvels.


George Orwells essay Book v, Cigarettes was first published in the “Tribune” newspaper, onth February, He had no satisfactory explanation for why people were not reading, and estimated from the publishing and sales figures that he knew, that the average person was only buying about three books a year, in various ways.
This, he said:

“is not a proud record for a country which is nearlyper cent literate and where the ordinary man spends more on cigarettes than an Indian peasant has for his whole livelihood.
And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.
”

I wonder if this is still true, Books now, compared with, are beautifully produced, and a pleasure to hold in your hands, Factual books may have illustrations which can make you gasp, We have access to millions of ebooks as well, Reading is a solitary activity of course, and people need the human companionship that going to some sort of sports club, or meeting, or eating out provides.
But even allowing for this, activities using technology seem to have taken over,

When Book v, Cigarettes was published, doctors were encouraging people to smoke, Incredibly enough, fromtos, the health benefits of cigarettes were stressed, They even used to be advertised by doctors, It was only in the mids that it was reported that smoking causes lung cancer, laryngeal cancer and chronic bronchitis, Cigarettes are therefore no longer as popular as they once were, and more often frowned on socially, But we can think of many other comparisons, of what our friends and family might spend their leisure time and money on, and for many of us, books sadly still seem to come off worst.


This is a straightforward, witty essay, but George Orwells analysis is also a thoughtprovoking dilemma, Many people still seem hesitant about reading, overyears later, But for some it is a passion, giving many hour of enjoyment every week, entertaining us, expanding our horizons and enlarging our world view.
I find it very sad that for so many, they cannot seem to get past the idea that reading is something they “ought” to do, rather than such a pleasure.
.