I have been reading Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays. I have really enjoyed them. I think they contain some of Orwell's best writing. I have just finished Thus, Thus Were the Joys, which was a very long essay, more like a mini memoir about his days at prep school. I think it is probably the best thing he wrote, certainly something to think about next time you watch Downton Abbey or some other period drama about posh people. One of the reviews on the book cover, by Christopher Hitchens, says Orwell is still vividly contemporary. I thought so myself. Sometimes when you read a book written long ago, or by a very old person, it feels like going back in time, but I did not get that feeling. This despite some of the situations he describes sounding straight out of Dickens, for example, The Spike, about sleeping at a homeless shelter, or How the Poor Die about a hospital in Paris that Orwell was ill at in the late 1920s. How the Poor Die was interesting, bearing in mind the recent controversy about the standard of care at some NHS hospitals recently. I was reading it while travelling to visit my father in a nursing home. I am glad to say the care he receives is orders of magnitude better than that. Other essays, for example Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War, are interesting because you can see how his thinking is developing towards him writing Animal Farm and particularly 1984.