The most recommended George Orwell books

This collection of short detective stories features Sayers’ most famous sleuth Lord Peter Whimsey, but also the lesser-known Montague Egg. Sayers was a marketing professional, and this comes out in the Egg stories, about a travelling salesman who gets involved in mysteries, the police allowing him to do so partly because of his quirky and unassuming personality. Egg frequently quotes useful maxims from his favourite book The Salesman’s Handbook, thinking laterally to solve puzzles that elude formal detectives. This book has no supernatural aspect but is included here as the idea of a ‘detective that is not a detective’ always intrigued me. I chose this device for my (very different to Egg) detective protagonist Jack Sangster, partly as a result of reading In the Teeth of the Evidence.  

I return to this book again and again – and I do so as a Socialist. It is storytelling at its very best; the analogy of the farm animal's revolt is brilliance. If ever a book predicted the reality of history and humanity through their failings, it is Animal Farm.

You immediately bond with the animals and their struggles, but the insidious nature of the pig's totalitarian regime as later created, soon returns the reader to reality. One is left to understand that Karl Marx hit the nail on the head; Socialism cannot exist without being born of a democracy. A fact that the Soviets, through the crimes of its Red Terror, missed.

Orwell has always been presented as anti-communist, but in reality, he was anything but, he was a realist, a pragmatist, and an anti-totalitarian who fought in the Spanish Civil War.

Humans are always curious about what the future will look like. They are also concerned about the state impinging on their privacy and interfering with their lives. George Orwell masterfully combined these two human impulses in his classic novel. He wrote the book in 1949 to present his view of the future.

I read this book when I was in my mid-20s. I found it an interesting read, especially since many of his predictions did not come true. I was curious to know how past generations viewed our generation. 

I recall reading it in my late teens, less as the classic it was on the barbarous Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, and more as a personal discovery by Orwell of how his democratic socialist instincts were sharpened and shaped by the buffeting swirl of ideological clashes and bitter sectarian struggles within the inspirational resistance to Franco’s fascism in Spain. As he witnessed the heroism and the horror, the passion and sometimes the ulterior purposes of these competing groups, Homage to Catalonia for me was a gripping narrative, climaxing in the internecine firefight in Barcelona where the left helped defeat itself, and thereby opened the door to Franco’s murderous victory and equally murderous rule. 

Like Orwell’s, the socialism that I had come to believe in during the first ten years of my life in Britain was instinctively ‘libertarian’ rather than ‘statist’, favouring democracy and liberty rather than central control… show more.

Here’s another book with two lovers occupying two parallel realities, though I would say that the romance is almost beside the point in this book, where a multitude of stranger, more engrossing things are always threatening to steal the spotlight: Cults! A town of cats! The return of Ushikawa! Two moons! A novel named Air Chrysalis! You couldn’t ask for more, really.

The novel really captures the nature of memory and what it means to love and care about others.

Frightening stuff happens in the book—things are disappearing—but it’s told with a warm and light tone, almost as if you’re sailing down a river. Ogawa captures quiet moments like friends eating a slice of cake with such luminosity.

Even when the world is falling apart, there is time for conversations with friends and meals together. 

First published in 1959, Naked Lunch was shocking then, and it still retains its power today. Both in content and structure, Naked Lunch is powerful and wholly original.  In effect, it becomes more than a work of fiction, it becomes an experience. Burroughs invented a technique called the “cut-up method,” where he cut up his coherent storyline into paragraphs, scenes, and even sentences, then reordered them both randomly and editorially. The disorder thematically represents the chaos of existence and the universe, and it also disrupts the reader. Like the book or not, it shakes you into realizing that there are possibilities beyond the conventional.

Burrough’s language is honed to a razor’s edge, and I find that many of the sentences in Naked Lunch burn like fire. The meaning of the title as Burroughs explains it is to bare the naked truth of reality on the end of a fork. From… show more.

I re-read this in the wake of writing an introduction and afterword to a forthcoming edition of Julian Maclaren-Ross’s humorous yet melancholy Memoirs of the Forties, which could be described as a 1940s Withnail & I.

First published in 1944, The Stuff To Give The Troops collects his often very brief short stories about his far-from-heroic experiences as a conscript in the British army during World War II. They’re written in a conversational style that still feels fresh and modern. So too does their jaundiced tone, which prefigures M*A*S*H and Catch-22.

You can see why these stories quickly established him as a rising star whose admirers included George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene.

Although set in a near-future America, I related to the way these two sisters had to live, conserving electricity and resources, running a generator, and always having to think carefully about whether to drive the 30 miles into town. Most haunting to me were the scenes where Eva, a dedicated dancer, practiced over and over an audition routine without the benefit of music, having to rely on the soundtrack in her head.

These two women were at the precipice of their adult lives, just beginning to actualize their talents, when they experienced a societal collapse. As the reader going along with them, it made me think about priorities, relationships, and who I would be without modern technology.  

Orwell captures the dilemma of empire so well that every time I read it, my nerves get raw. It’s a trap. Everyone is dehumanized, the oppressors and the oppressed. The sneering townspeople, the trips on the football pitch, the clear-sighted way the crowd intuits the relationship between themselves and the young policeman all ring true. The villagers can control him because they understand the expectations he has as an official of the crown. They use his strength against him to get what they want. He doesn’t want to kill the elephant, but it’s expected of him, so he gruesomely shoots into the elephant's mouth till, like the British empire, it finally dies. The villagers pillage the carcass for meat. For Orwell, empire itself is brutal suicide.