Of babes and sucklings….
Via the Flying Rodent we find this collection of dire reviews of various classic books. Some of them are simply funny or haven’t quite got the point of the book but this one….well, there’s a great deal more truth in it than many English Lit. types might want to admit:
6. Ulysses: "It is the only book I can think of where the reader deserves more credit for finishing it than the author."
In
Who could argue with this? : –
9. 1984: “The fall of Communism has erased nearly every trace of relevance this book may once have had. ”
Me.
Lord of the Flies:
I had to read this book for literiture class I hated it. my teacher rattled on about the symbolizm in this book.It was so boring and kinda gory. Plus no girls, wasnt they susposed to repopulate the world after nuclear war so not possible wih only boys. The one thing i found interesting was how they acted like wild animals after they had been on the island a while.that was kinda cool.But it was to confusing.”
Did the blogger get permission from The Sun to reprint this review, I wonder?
Dave Heasman: 1984 is probably the most relevant book ever published for today’s Britain. Orwell was 13 years too early, and given how long ago it was published – 1949 – it is so astute it is breath-taking. A projection 50 years into the future. And he read the British absolutely right.
We all assumed that Big Brother was the Soviet Union and that we had defeated it, but of course, the Soviets were just the warm-up act.
The real 1984 is Tony Blair’s Britain with the destruction of centuries-old civil liberties, our Constitution and our Bill of Rights (which he didn’t know we had) along with the deliberate fracturing of a cohesive society.
An excellent, much-admired education system has been destroyed to the point where third generation immigrant parents are sending their children back to the W Indies to be educated. A record of being the first in the world with public health rules (no spitting) and eradicating communicable diseases rolled back to accommodate Third World “immigrants”, and boring old middle class and working class values (“better yourself”) mocked. Add spying on the citizens on a scale that would have made a Stasi chief salivate, CCTV cameras infesting the entire country, making the British the most spied-upon people in the world, speed cameras recording every journey anyone takes, and soon, a micro-chip identity card that will make available the history of every citizen of the British gulag to all government ministries.
Add a prime minister who is a congenital fantasist and an enforcer, like Alastair Campbell, to control the press (did a single British paper dare to print the Motoons that were printed in France, Germany, Sweden, Jordan and Mexico?), attempts to control the internet, the creation of a giant gambling casino society for drug dealers, slave traders (aka ‘people dealers’) to launder money. Total loss of control over the borders that hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens throughout the ages have fought and died to defend and the inevitable fracturing of our national identity.
1984 is here. This is possibly the most relevant book in the Anglosphere, other than the Bible and the Torah.
Verity, thy name is truth.
Your words should be engraved on a gold tablet and nailed over the entrance to the House of Commons.
Verity, dear boy/girl/concept, I live in the South of England and was using a form of expression common to that area.
It was good to smoke you out. Thanks.
dave heasman – “smoke me out”? What on earth are you talking about? Why would I have the faintest interest in where you live?
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