Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

Orwellian. Haha just my little joke there. Grim and funny – as one expects from Orwell – set in London, 1936. A dismal anticapitalist poet rails against the evils of money and advertising, packs in his job as a copywriter and wallows in poverty and despair. The nadir of the story – the mess he makes after he sells a poem and makes $50 – is so knucle-bitingly awful I could only read a page or two per sitting from all the cringing. After that episode, it levels back out into an enjoyable read. Not my favourite of his but well worth a read with some laugh out loud bits, particularly around his seedy bookshop employer, Mr Cheeseman, described thusly: Mr Cheeseman was not a bad person to work for, so long as you understood that if you worked till the Day of Judgement you would never get a rise of wages. His legs were of normal length, but the top half of his body was so short that his buttocks seemed to sprout almost immediately below his shoulder blades. This gave him, in walking, a…