I was embarrassingly late to the Rebecca Solnit train, only really discovering her at the start of the pandemic, but now I’m one hundred percent on board and more than happy to go wherever she might think to take me. This particular journey - which uses Orwell’s life as a path to illuminate and discuss a myraid of issues, people, cultures, and political positions - is one I very much needed to go on.

I took my time with this book, reading one essay a night (so it took me most of the month to finish reading), and I’m glad I did. There is so much in these easily readable pages, a depth of thought that invites introspection and further study and has left me with a list of things I want to read or re-read (only a third of them being by Orwell). Every essay was time well spent but I found particular resonance in In Praise Of, Buttered Toast, Empire of Lies, and The Crystal Spirit.

Despite dealing with a lot of very profound, distressing, and timely topics it is a very positive book, offering us ways of thinking - and by extention acting - that help us look at possible futures and seeing hope in the warnings those possibilities contain instead of sinking into the ennui of despair. As she say in the essay “As the Rose-Hip to the Rose”:

A warning is not a prophecy: the former assumes that we have choices and cautions us about the consequences; the latter operates on the basis of a fixed future (and of course the novel was about atrocities and perils in the present, as well as what they might become if taken to their logical end). As the novelist and speculator on utopias and dystopias Octavia Butler put it, “The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.”

I have found much to think about and much to investigate in these well-written pages and it is another book that I hope everyone will pick up to read and be open to the messages contained within.