I’ve been chipping away at a collection of George Orwell’s essays. They’re fascinating, whether he’s dissecting Charles Dickens’ faux-distaste of the gilded class or ruminating on the plight of unskilled laborers in Morocco, or, most vividly, reporting on his experience of shooting an elephant. At present I’m reading “England Your England”, and the following bit of wisdom stood out to me:

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted passage, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr. Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks.

Substitute Shakespeare with Mark Twain and Goebbels with, say, Glenn Beck, and I’d say this portrait makes for a pretty accurate assessment of the United States today.

In order to be somebody, people must feel themselves part of something. In the nonviolent army, there is room for everyone who wants to join up. There is no color distinction. There is no examination, no pledge, except that, as a soldier in the armies of violence is expected to inspect his carbine and keep it clean, nonviolent soldiers are called upon to examine and burnish their greatest weapons – their heart, their conscience, their courage and their sense of justice.

…

Human beings with all their faults and strengths constitute the mechanism of a social movement. They must make mistakes and learn from them, make more mistakes and learn anew. They must taste defeat as well as success, and discover how to live with each. Time and action are the teachers.

MLK, Why We Can’t Wait, 1963.

My parents cleaned out their library this weekend, and of the probably hundreds of titles that they will be giving to the town library or other charities, I plucked out a few (well, sixteen) books, enumerated below. This is in addition to the five books I got over the holidays. Many of them are classics, or by classic authors, that I feel I should read, you know, just because. Being home for the last six months and working on this photography project with my grandparents has put me in a sort of historical-retrospective frame of mind, even as I make plans to make my own way forward.

Compiling such a massive list is probably way too ambitious, so I’m going to go ahead and give myself the option in advance of not finishing them all.

Just finished: A Most Wanted Man, by John LeCarre. Description.

This was my first foray into the well-known LeCarre-nival of spy stories, and pretty much lived up to the hype. If you dig James Bond/Jason Bourne type stuff, but without the machismo and gadgets, you get good stories of espionage that probably had a lot of significance last century. Sort of like the “From Russia With Love” era Bond. All that said, I’m pretty sure I never need to read another LeCarre novel again to know what they’re all about, though I wouldn’t be averse to being proven wrong. File under: pleasant ways to pass time in a peaceful, contented world.

Currently reading: What is the What, by Dave Eggers. Description.

See previous post on the subject here. This is a book much more suited to the day, as it simply and plainly tells the story of a complicated, multi-level world of suffering and perseverance without any illusions of good or evil, us and them, right and wrong. It really is heartbreaking, but it is as honest a description of what it means to be human as I’ve come across. File under: must reads.

Below, in no particular order, are things I’ll hopefully get to in the next couple of five years. If you’ve read any of these, or have any suggestions in terms of order or even substitutes, please feel free to leave your comments.

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No, the title of this post does not refer in any way to this blog, it refers to the latest novel by Dave Eggers (“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”), which tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. It’s a novel, as opposed to autobiography, because while Deng’s story is told in the first person, it recounts experiences of both himself and others, the effect being to illustrate the general plight of the more than 27,000 young male refugees from the Second Sudanese Civil War who attempted (and to some degree, succeeded) to escape the violence by going to Ethiopia, then Kenya, on foot. This is an interesting facet of the story, as it perhaps reflects a cultural identity as being group-like in nature, as opposed to our western idea of the sole individual path. But I’ll leave those thoughts for another time.

The book was given to me by my uncle, though it has been recommended by others, and he said I’d be hooked almost instantly. I’ve only read about 40 pages, and can already tell you that he was right. However, the reason I’m writing about it now is that something in particular jumped out at me from the first chapter. At this point in the story, Deng has been living in the U.S. for a few years, and although he has been warned about theft and violence in the low-rent community where he lives, he naively opens the door to some strangers and is robbed and beaten. After being intially pistol-whipped and subdued, he begins to take stock of what they might steal:

Lying here, I begin to calculate what they can take from me. I realize with some satisfaction that my computer is in my car, and will be spared. But [Deng's roomate] Achor Achor’s new laptop will be stolen… The records of all the meetings, the finances, thousands of e-mails.

For a victim of civil war, who for years has hidden, been shot at, seen friends killed by planes, soldiers, disease, starvation, even taken by lions, has walked hundreds if not thousands of miles through harsh terrain, then been transplanted to a new and mind-bogglingly different place, a laptop computer is the first thing that he thinks of.

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