keep the aspidistra flying - george orwell

This is what i am currently reading. It is incredibly depressing, but yet written so well that you can't put it down. In fact, it is incredibly depressing BECAUSE it is written so well.

It gets under your skin and in your head and suddenly you are living the thoughts of the protagonist, in this case a fledgling poet battling severe cases of anti-capitalism, male ego and an inferiority complex the size of China (this is all my humble opinion, btw).

Not that I am a male egoist nor anti-capitalism..helo i have a car sticker which advocates retail therapy, but...there are definitely moments where i identify with the writer about going on doing things that depresses you, but you do it anyway out of habit/fear of looking foolish/ simply fear of not having done the alternative before (see Chapter 4 on the bit about him not going into the pubs). Point being, all the fear is in your head - actually that's where most of a person's biggest obstacles are anyway, don't you think?

My sister does not understand why I bother with such books because they are so painfully real they give you heartburn after reading them. But that is exactly why i bother, and love George Orwell's stuff - clarity, which is so important, and finally something i can say "yes, i totally agree" to.

I found a website with an online version of the book (check out www.george-orwell.org/Keep_the_Aspidistra_Flying/0.html if you are interested heheh..)

An excerpt i find memorable; this is Gordon Comstock (the protagonist) describing his lower-middle class family:

"It was not MERELY the lack of money. It was rather that, having no money, they still lived mentally in the money-world--the world in which money is virtue and poverty is crime. It was not poverty but the down-dragging of RESPECTABLE poverty that had done for them. They had accepted the money-code, and by that code they were failures. They had never had the sense to lash out and just LIVE, money or no money, as the lower classes do. How right the lower classes are! Hats off to the factory lad who with fourpence in the world puts his girl in the family way! At least he's got blood and not money in his veins."

liberating thought, isn't it?