Chapter 14 Summary

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 would be handled by long reviews, over a 1000 words. Most of the rest would be...