George Orwell

Much like for my favorite movies, here is a list of my Top 25 favorite writers.

1. Vladimir Nabokov
2. Ray Bradbury
3. JRR Tolkien
4. Kurt Vonnegut
5. Douglas Adams
6. Mark Twain

The rest in alphabetical order by last name:

• Robert Benchley
• Charlotte Brontë
• Emily Brontë
• Albert Camus
• Raymond Chandler
• Umberto Eco
• William Gibson
• Spalding Gray
• Franz Kafka
• Milan Kundera
• Ursula K Le Guin
• George Orwell
• Dorothy Parker
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Muriel Spark
• Bram Stoker
• Jules Verne
• Edith Wharton
• HG Wells

Honorable Mentions

• Jane Austen
• Jorge Luis Borges
• George Carlin
• Philip K Dick
• James Ellroy
• Ernest Hemingway
• James Joyce
• Jack Kerouac
• Stephen King
• Herman Melville
• Flannery O'Connor
• William Shakespeare
• Mary Shelley
• Neal Stephenson
• John Steinbeck
• Hunter S Thompson
• Virginia Woolf
• Oscar Wilde
• PG Wodehouse
• Emile Zola

TED Fellow and journalist Evgeny Morozov punctures what he calls "iPod liberalism" -- the assumption that tech innovation always promotes freedom, democracy -- with chilling examples of ways the Internet helps oppressive regimes stifle dissent.

Appropriately, having just finished reading 1984 for its 60th anniversary, comes this talk on how the net is tearing down social and political walls, and how the walls fight back.

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

Current coolness around the literary net.

Updated on Project Gutenberg: The Door Through Space (1961) by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

... across half a Galaxy, the Terran Empire maintains its sovereignty with the consent of the governed. It is a peaceful reign, held by compact and not by conquest. Again and again, when rebellion threatens the Terran Peace, the natives of the rebellious world have turned against their own people and sided with the men of Terra; not from fear, but from a sense of dedication.

There has never been open war. The battle for these worlds is fought in the minds of a few men who stand between worlds; bound to one world by interest, loyalties and allegiance; bound to the other by love.

Such a world is Wolf. Such a man was Race Cargill of the Terran Secret Service.

"Some love of the new and marvellous." at Mapping the Marvelous.

[Charles] Darwin - whose 200th birthday we are celebrating this year - was asked by his half-cousin Francis Galton to fill out a seven-page questionnaire in 1873. Galton carried out a survey of the mental attributes of scientific men, intending to identify the 'genius' or talent for science that, as he believed, characterised the British nation (published as English Men of Science, Their Nature and Nurture in 1874).

"The prose style that launched a revolution" at the Guardian Books Blog.

Re-reading The Origin of Species, it's fascinating to see what a cautious kind of iconoclast Darwin was.

"What George Orwell would make of our financial 'apocalypse'" at Telegraph.co.uk.

A flick through the great author's work soon puts paid to self pity, argues Michael Deacon

"Raising a Glass to Mr Poe" by Neil Gaiman.

It's Edgar Allan Poe's 200th birthday today. And while I twittered a link to this, it occurs to me that I should have blogged it too. It's an essay I wrote as an introduction for a collected volume of Poe stories (now on deep discount at Barnes and Noble):

I met Poe first in an anthology with a title like "Fifty Stories for Boys." I was eleven, and the story was "Hop-Frog," that remarkable tale of terrible revenge, which sat incongruously beside the tales of boys having adventures of desert islands or discovering secret plans hidden inside hollowed-out vegetables. As the king and his seven courtiers, tarred and chained, were hauled upwards, as the jester they had called Hop-Frog clambered up the chain, holding his burning torch, I found myself astonished and elated by the appropriateness of his monstrous revenge.[...]

"The Elephant" by Aravind Adiga, fiction in the New Yorker.

All the employees of the furniture shop had gathered in a semicircle around Mr. Ganesh Pai's table. It was a special day: Mrs. Engineer had come to the shop in person.

She had seen her TV table, and now she was approaching Mr. Pai's desk to finalize the deal.

His face was smeared with sandalwood, and he wore a loose-fitting silk shirt through which a dark triangle of chest hair stuck out. On the wall behind his chair he had hung gold foil images of Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, and the fat elephant god, Ganapati. An incense stick smoked below the images.

Mrs. Engineer sat down slowly at the desk. Mr. Pai reached into his drawer, then held out four red cards to her. Mrs. Engineer paused, bit her lip, and snatched at one of the cards.[...]

OK, they must be working on The Matrix -- there has been a sudden camel synchronicity.

First was this entry at the Orwell Diaries, "September 14, 1938, Marrakech", which I read yesterday:

Saw a man carrying a hare, otherwise no wild quadrupeds at all. There are said to be literally none, except a few hares and jackals, in Fr. Morrocco°. A few camels in Sp. Morocco, but not common till south of Casablanca. In general a camel seems to stand about 18 hands high. All are extremely lean & have calloused patches on all joints.

Then this morning, one of the Flickr users I follow, La Route, happened to post this image of "A laid-back Dromedary for hire in Marrakech", who looks to be in much better shape than the ones described by Orwell (click to see larger):

And as if that weren't enough, here's another item that showed up in my news reader this morning, "Keith Bellows: Celebrating the camel", from a 2002 TED conference, just posted today:

Keith Bellows gleefully outlines the engineering marvels of the camel, a vital creature he calls "the SUV of the desert." Though he couldn't bring a live camel to TED, he gets his camera crew as close as humanly possible to a one-ton beast in full rut.

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So I'm not sure what the universe is trying to tell me, but somehow camels are involved.

So I'm cruising through my NetNewsWire feeds this morning and happen to notice that the Orwell Diaries blog name was in a different color:

That particular color indicates a feed that hasn't been updated in a while. A smidgen perplexing, especially since I'd read today's entry earlier this morning. Looking up at the entries list, however, revealed the issue:

So, yes, 1938 is "a while" since it was last updated. ;)

I love how Orwell punctuates abstract thoughts with startling, concrete imagery in this excerpt from "Politics And The English Language" (1946):

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not a 'party line'. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.