| Re: What Did You Just Finish?
A Collection of Essays by George Orwell. Obviously, everyone knows Orwell for 1984 and Animal Farm, but he's just a fantastically interesting man no matter what he writes; I normally can barely slog through anything non-fictional or realistic, but I really enjoyed both his Down and Out in Paris and London (which was the former) and Burmese Days (which was the latter.) In those, as with this collection, you get (or at least I got) the sense that he's a perfectly intellectually honest man. He seems willing to admit all of his faults whenever they are relevant to what he writes, and equally willing to lay all of his views out in the open, such that any biases are perfectly honest.
More specifically, in this book of essays, he talks about a number of terribly interesting subjects, most notably the English language and a few of my favorite English authors (well, one English and one American,) Dickens and Henry Miller. I've always felt there was nothing so instructive as literary criticism coming from someone whose writing I already admire, and in Orwell's case, this proves true. I may be gushing here, but honestly, I love his writing so much that I deliberately bought a book of essays. God, he's brilliant.
Can't really give it a rating since it's a collection of essays, but I did love it.
| 
