Coming Up for Air
Years in insurance and marriage to the joyless Hilda have been no more than death in life to George Bowling. This and fear of another war take his mind back to the peace of his childhood in a small country town. But his return journey to Lower Binfield brings complete disillusionment.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
10mentions
9people
2020–2026years
60% recommend40% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I think 1984 and Animal Farm have to be at the top of the list, in that order.
I agree Down and Out in Paris and London follows close behind, and the best of his essays come next.
I think Homage to Catalonia is not a great book, but valuable for the autobiographical insight about Orwell, and how it informed him to write those other, better works.
I would also add that Coming Up For Air is delightful and underrated. Try the audio book. Any middle-aged man can appreciate the quiet understated honesty.
- Coming Up for Air is practically my childhood in a nutshell
- "Coming Up for Air" is another of his lesser known works, which is worth a read.
- I enjoyed Coming Up For Air. I didn't find the description in the article matched the book. The nostalgia in the book is that of the character not of the author. There is a reasonable ironic distance between the two. The narrator is an unloveable middle aged prick really. What works well in the book is how threadbare and futile the social contract is shown to be. The character and their life illustrate it brilliantly without it seeming preachy.
- I was surprised at how modern many of the themes in both Keep The Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up For Air are, from (in Keep The Aspidistra Flying) the negative effects of commercialisation and mass advertising, obsession with (because of a dependence on) money, difficulties making ends meet when trying to follow your dreams, the alternative of meaningless but well paying jobs, to (in Coming Up For Air) a reaction against property development and what you might even call environmentalism.
The book shop that Orwell worked in and lived above when he wrote Keep The Aspidistra Flying is now split between a fancy bakery and a hairdresser. I get my hair cut at the hairdresser.
- It's been progressively so throughout the entire 20th century. George Orwell wrote about the suburbanisation of rural life in his "Coming Up for Air" [1] back in the 1930s. Highly recommended.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/509080.Coming_Up_for_Air
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