Wired Mesh

Readings

"He should be interested in everything: the love life of toads, the way tortoises drink and the poor die, the dynamics of anti-Semitism, the differences between Caslon and sans-serif types, the motives impelling ordinary people to read, why books get written at all, the price of food, the reason women do not as a rule become stamp collectors, and the reason shipwrecks and trial scenes are literary staples. The critic should be able, like Orwell, to get an idea of the riches of the New World by noting of Mark Twain's America that the smallest coin then circulating was equivalent not to a British penny but a British shilling."

–Paul Fussell, "George Orwell: The Critic as Honest Man," Thank God for the Atom Bomb