kizzia's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
I was embarrassingly late to the Rebecca Solnit train, only really discovering her at the start of the pandemic, but now I’m one hundred percent on board and more than happy to go wherever she might think to take me. This particular journey - which uses Orwell’s life as a path to illuminate and discuss a myraid of issues, people, cultures, and political positions - is one I very much needed to go on.
I took my time with this book, reading one essay a night (so it took me most of the month to finish reading), and I’m glad I did. There is so much in these easily readable pages, a depth of thought that invites introspection and further study and has left me with a list of things I want to read or re-read (only a third of them being by Orwell). Every essay was time well spent but I found particular resonance in In Praise Of, Buttered Toast, Empire of Lies, and The Crystal Spirit.
Despite dealing with a lot of very profound, distressing, and timely topics it is a very positive book, offering us ways of thinking - and by extention acting - that help us look at possible futures and seeing hope in the warnings those possibilities contain instead of sinking into the ennui of despair. As she say in the essay “As the Rose-Hip to the Rose”:
A warning is not a prophecy: the former assumes that we have choices and cautions us about the consequences; the latter operates on the basis of a fixed future (and of course the novel was about atrocities and perils in the present, as well as what they might become if taken to their logical end). As the novelist and speculator on utopias and dystopias Octavia Butler put it, “The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.”
I have found much to think about and much to investigate in these well-written pages and it is another book that I hope everyone will pick up to read and be open to the messages contained within.
I took my time with this book, reading one essay a night (so it took me most of the month to finish reading), and I’m glad I did. There is so much in these easily readable pages, a depth of thought that invites introspection and further study and has left me with a list of things I want to read or re-read (only a third of them being by Orwell). Every essay was time well spent but I found particular resonance in In Praise Of, Buttered Toast, Empire of Lies, and The Crystal Spirit.
Despite dealing with a lot of very profound, distressing, and timely topics it is a very positive book, offering us ways of thinking - and by extention acting - that help us look at possible futures and seeing hope in the warnings those possibilities contain instead of sinking into the ennui of despair. As she say in the essay “As the Rose-Hip to the Rose”:
A warning is not a prophecy: the former assumes that we have choices and cautions us about the consequences; the latter operates on the basis of a fixed future (and of course the novel was about atrocities and perils in the present, as well as what they might become if taken to their logical end). As the novelist and speculator on utopias and dystopias Octavia Butler put it, “The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.”
I have found much to think about and much to investigate in these well-written pages and it is another book that I hope everyone will pick up to read and be open to the messages contained within.
stormy_reading's review
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
kendramichele's review
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
When we think of George Orwell, we think of what he wrote against: corruption, authoritarianism, manipulation, and the erosion of privacy.
This book is a lovely discussion of the Orwell we're less familiar with, the man who devoted considerable labor to and took pleasure in the surface of the earth, whose gaze was not only trained on political monstrosities but on animals, plants, the countryside - "places in which nothing is wrong and no conflicts raged."
The narrative frequently wanders off the path, covering a number of topics beyond Orwell, from colonialism, history, and gardens as political spaces to the international flower market and the exploitative pressure it places on workers.
I most enjoyed how Solnit delved into the ideology of roses, arguing that pleasures are not indulgent distractions or counterrevolutionary desires. We may often feel too exhausted for beauty, but beauty can be studying what we do not wish to change, or tending the seed of where we hope to go next.
There are many reasons to continue cultivating beauty, perhaps most crucially because there is beauty in our deepest values and what flows from them: honest intentions, clarity, accuracy, integrity, and connection.
I recently read 1984 for the first time and was struck by how tenderly Orwell portrays his deeply flawed characters. It was extremely evident how passionate Orwell was about understanding language and its ability to evolve or reign over us, how he understood that ethics are entangled with aesthetics.
In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses. 87 years later, those rosebushes are still growing strong. I'm walking away with a better understanding of what the writer's passions meant to him. If most of writing is time spent thinking, perhaps that thinking was best done while engaging in his garden, where nature was an act of faith and joy was intrinsic to building a better world.
This book is a lovely discussion of the Orwell we're less familiar with, the man who devoted considerable labor to and took pleasure in the surface of the earth, whose gaze was not only trained on political monstrosities but on animals, plants, the countryside - "places in which nothing is wrong and no conflicts raged."
The narrative frequently wanders off the path, covering a number of topics beyond Orwell, from colonialism, history, and gardens as political spaces to the international flower market and the exploitative pressure it places on workers.
I most enjoyed how Solnit delved into the ideology of roses, arguing that pleasures are not indulgent distractions or counterrevolutionary desires. We may often feel too exhausted for beauty, but beauty can be studying what we do not wish to change, or tending the seed of where we hope to go next.
There are many reasons to continue cultivating beauty, perhaps most crucially because there is beauty in our deepest values and what flows from them: honest intentions, clarity, accuracy, integrity, and connection.
I recently read 1984 for the first time and was struck by how tenderly Orwell portrays his deeply flawed characters. It was extremely evident how passionate Orwell was about understanding language and its ability to evolve or reign over us, how he understood that ethics are entangled with aesthetics.
In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses. 87 years later, those rosebushes are still growing strong. I'm walking away with a better understanding of what the writer's passions meant to him. If most of writing is time spent thinking, perhaps that thinking was best done while engaging in his garden, where nature was an act of faith and joy was intrinsic to building a better world.