This essay opens with a hilarious portrait of a rumpled, jaded book reviewer, working at home amidst the rubble of his life. The man has ripped apart a packet of five substantial, totally disconnected, volumes, of such ennui-producing content that he has fallen into the stagnation of moral paralysis, even though the clock is ticking.
He will approach the hideous of analyzing half-read and half-digested like this for over a hundred times a year, many times having to invent unfelt reactions to compendiums of undistilled, badly-written and boring information he can barely stand reading, much less reviewing. Once in a while, he stumbles on one or two he actually likes writing about.
Orwell suggests that, in an ideal world, the number of books reviewed be greatly restricted. These.....
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