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This book is just fun to read. I had a hard time putting it down. It's full of funny stuff and hot vampire males! I can't wait to read the next one!

Recently I have been having trouble finding time to set aside in order to read anything longer than a newspaper. This is a relatively new problem, but the advent of both my work and social life suddenly becoming much busier, a long term girlfriend who I do not see as much as I would like and a commute that has changed from an hour uninterrupted bus ride to a walk-tube-dash, all mean it is a reasonably serious one. If I wasn’t going to fall at the first hurdle of my 52 books in 52 weeks challenge, I would have to find something that would allow me to hit the ground running which could be consumed in short bursts and which would not suffer for it, before I become more “disciplined”. With all of the above in mind, Books vs Cigarettes (Penguin, 2009) was the perfect way to begin. Part of the penguin “Great Ideas” series, it collects a number of Orwell’s essays and journalism from the post war period, around the time of the publication of animal farm. The first thing that strikes you is the series this collection is a part of. I doubt that Orwell would ever have claimed to have been the originator of an original “great idea” and there certainly isn’t one to be found here. Orwell’s great strength, and what makes him as relevant today as he was in 1945, is his skill at interpreting the world - for seeing things clearly and reporting them to us with rare analysis, coupled with an even rarer skill as a writer. A strange decision indeed then, but who am I to argue with a marketing strategy which has been hugely successful? So to the meat; the actual collection itself. This is quite simply a wonderful collection; it begins with an essay arguing that one spends more on smoking than on books, concluding therefore that cost cannot be given as reason why reading is an unpopular pastime and ends with a broad and illustrative account of his time at St Cyprian's, an old fashioned pre-world war one prep school. Of particular interest to some will be “The Prevention of Literature” which can be used to make some of our party line following left-wing brothers and sisters squirm when they claim there is no left wing tradition backing up the last Labour government’s woeful record on civil liberties. Hyperbole is redundant when discussing Orwell, all imaginable praise that could be heaped on him as a writer has been, and by the shovel load. As such he’s become a sacred cow amongst the British chattering classes. This collection is fascinating also, because we see him as a more three dimensional character than perhaps we are used to. In “How the poor die” he slips in some quite horrific snobbery about English nurses as part of a back handed compliment, the afore mentioned essay on his school days drips with bitterness at the whole experience and now and again there’s more than a hint of xenophobia about his writing. None of this detracts from the great writing on offer here, and no one who has taken more than a passing interest in Orwell will be at all surprised by these ”flaws”. What it does do is give you a human writer, rather than the infallible commentator some would have you expect. There are better introductions to Orwell in general, and better introductions to Orwell as a journalist/essayist (I’d recommend “Shooting an Elephant”). But for anyone who wants to expand their knowledge, read some excellent thought provoking writing, discover more of Orwell than just 1984 and Animal Farm, or just needs something easy to read on the tube as I did, this cannot be recommended enough. 4.5/5 Books vs. Cigarettes George Orwell Penguin 2009