Shooting an Elephant and other essays

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.

Half-finished love affair

Reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas which is since yesterday overdue at the library. I guess will pay the fines for a few days till I finish it. I was inspired by a quote from the book itself. In the Letters from Zedelghem the musician Robert Frobisher writes:

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

Guess I must end the love affair even it means a few days delay for the next person in queue.

Brilliant writing. Masterful in the way Mitchell controls the registers and tone of the different voices. There are many of them. More when I am done...