42 Books Like Things I Don't Want to Know

Other than the odd dry chuckle, no major laughs here – but you certainly ponder. Slim and compact, this selection of four of Orwell’s most compelling essays is a fitting format for the prose within. Typically Orwellian, no word is wasted, none ill-used; statements are incisive, ideas sharply defined, and imagery spare yet vivid. Clarity is the keynote; probing entertainment the effect. The topics – his own literary motivation, the condition of twentieth-century England, a biting attack on sloppy verbiage and on rhetoric for political fudge, the stark yet witty vignette of a public hanging – all are lucid and provocative. His comments are as relevant today as they were in the 1940s. George Orwell and Graham Greene: what masterly writers!

Natalie Jenner sets her story of post-World War II feminism in a bookstore in England.

Three women, each of whom has proved their worth during the war years, must now face the fact that men are taking the reins once again. And yet, as Jenner makes clear, it is the women who have the intelligence, the ideas, and the skills to make this stagnant bookshop a vibrant and thriving place.

Jenner has done her research, and I love the way the setting and characters come alive, as do some real-life literary characters (always wonderful when that works). It's never a question that things will change at the shop—but how that happens makes for a delightful and satisfying read.

I found this a fun and brilliant story. I actually read it to my three nieces when they were 5, 7, and 11. It was great hearing their opinions on the story.  It’s one of those books that can be understood on different levels. 

In the simplest form, it is exactly what is written on the pages—a story about some farm animals who take over the farm. However, there are many layers to this simple tale. 

I love being able to re-read a book and understand it on a different level each time. To me, that is excellent writing, especially when combined with a fun and entertaining tale.

I have always been fascinated by Russian authors because of their command of presenting human nature and its fears. I picked up this book because the author is from Russia.

Yevgeny wrote this novel at the height of the  Russian Revolution in the aftermath of the First World War. He projected a society in a distant future, fearing that complete control of the state would turn us into monotonous machines. Anyone daring to be different would be eliminated to ensure compliance and similarity.

My only reservation is that the book borders on science fiction rather than historical fiction.

As an avid reader of biography, I was thrilled to discover this brilliant saga of George Orwell’s life as a journalist and activist and the rose bushes he purchased from Woolworths and planted in 1936 in an English garden.

The roses are a tangible presence in his participation in the Spanish Civil War and his support for women’s suffrage, universal justice, and human rights. I deeply admire how Solnit follows Orwell’s influence as a gardener and a humanist through a world hungry for his integrity and clarity of thought.

A lifelong hero of mine, George Orwell is best known for his political allegories Animal Farm and 1984, but his first published novel, written after a five-year stint as a policeman in Burma, gave an indication of his direction as a writer, with a vicious swipe at colonial attitudes and manners. The main character, John Flory, is a jaded teak merchant who detests the colonial “lie that we’re here to uplift our Black brothers instead of to rob them”. He has no friends at the local colonial club, is unlucky in love and meets a tragic end—all part of Orwell’s drive to “tell it like it is.”

Yoko Ogawa’s dystopian, magical realist novel delves into the darkness underneath our pursuit of—if not the normal—the routine. We witness a protagonist’s world shrink day by day through legally enforced forgetting. As the situation on the isolated island in which the protagonist lives deteriorates, perhaps the most terrifying part is that she finds herself complicit in her own isolation and near-total lack of agency.

One of the top freethinkers of the early 1900s, Chapman Cohen, is all but lost in the mists of history and obscurity. But he is one of my favorite sharp-eyed debunkers of humbug, without which debunking the truth stands no chance.

Cohen wrote on a wide variety of subjects, from how tyrants target scientists to the contemporary witch trials of his times to the connection between religious zealotry and a preoccupation with other people’s sexual practices to the differences between English and French atheism.

If you’ve read smart essays by the likes of Bertrand Russell and George Orwell, you will enjoy the essays of Chapman Cohen, a thinker you likely have never heard of—but might love to get to know.

Written forty years ago at the dawn of the personal computer age and well before the internet and the rise of social media, Postman’s book is a gripping read, a 20th-century warning for 21st-century readers about the dark consequences of the replacement of print media by visual forms of entertainment masquerading as information, a transformation that has had a devastating impact upon the ability of a citizenry to make informed decisions. 

In his relatively brief account, Postman described the way in which visual media overshadowed print in the 20th century. In that process, the “information” transmitted on a flickering screen became shaped by the need for brevity and, above all, the values of entertainment designed to “sell” products that cater to the emotional needs of the paying audience. While the printed words could be read and re-read for a more complex understanding of deeper meanings, electronic images were fleeting and,… show more.

What I like about Orwell is that he is uncompromising. His fiction, such as Animal Farm and 1984, is very well known, but some of his essays have been just as influential.

This is probably the most important one, in which Orwell makes a case for clarity and concision as the guiding principles of communication. Language is both cause and effect of meaning: it "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts."

Good writing, Orwell suggests, helps us retain freshness of thought; bad writing, conversely, deadens our sensibilities. Linguistic precision, in other words, is "not the exclusive concern of professional writers." We should all be concerned by cliché.