Những Câu Hỏi Hóc Búa Về Bản Thân tải xuống LIT miễn phí

Jordan Tillman jordanscanf8ec — I really love Orwell. I love him so much I didn't realize I loved him even after reading two of his books (1984 and Animal Farm, both early on in high school, which I'm in the process of finishing now.) A few years later, I'm a sort of very liberal, vaguely socialisty, let's-fight-back-against-the-bad-things kind of person, so from what I'd heard I thought this book would be right up my alley. And I really wasn't disappointed. But let's face it: this is Orwell. I read and read and don't really think about what I think until I suddenly realize that the novel is having a huge effect on me. And it was the same as always with this book. "Down and out", if you're wondering, is apparently a British term for down on your luck, or poor. The phrase's snappy sound to the American reader only improves the novel's careful balance between the funny and the horrifying. It follows an unnamed narrator (for some reason I see him as a Watkins or something like that) who first finds himself poor in France. He has to sell almost everything he owns, get a bunch of terrible-sounding jobs for very little pay, starve on the streets for days at a time, and somehow keep cheerful enough to go on. He has a motley crew of companions, all going through the same struggle, each with their own take and perspective on their desperate situation. When he manages to get out of Paris and back to London, where he lives, I thought he might have a shot at being happy for a while. But it turns out that his employer is gone, and he has spent all his money, and so once again he is penniless... It sounds bleak, and it is. But it's also FUNNY at parts. My favorite character was Bozo, a poverty-stricken pavement artist with an astonishingly optimistic point of view. "It don't follow that because a man's on the road, he can't think of nothing but tea and two-slices," he says. And he keeps plodding on, perfectly happy. It took me two weeks to read this book, and it wasn't quite unputdownable, but I did a lot of staring at the page in horror and a lot of laughing, and when I finished it, I did that thing where I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what to do next because the book is still crowding up my brain. And then I thought it would be forgettable. But it's not. Actually, of all the novels I've read, this might be the one that I think of most often, aside from the Harry Potter books (which pretty much summed up my childhood, so I think about them all the time) and maybe a few beloved others. Almost every day there's something that reminds me of this book. And the struggles chronicled in it still take place all over the world. It's sobering and important and needs to be fixed. My perspective has been sharpened through reading it. It's made me understand more, emphathize more, and more restless to do what I can to help. I think this should be an assigned book for everyone old enough to understand it. It's a shaping-the-future kind of book, even if it was written in 1933.

Kim Hey kimseran2248a9 — Good book. Definitely left the end open and left you wanting more. I need that next installment Mr Williams!!