Keep the Aspidistra Flying

What Hacker News says

1. AnimatsJan 2021
   "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" is very funny. It's been made into a movie twice. The 1965 one is closer to the original.

   It used to be available on line, but with the copyright crackdown, films only of historical interest, with near zero revenue potential, are no longer available.

   "Orwell, the Lost Writings" is quite useful. It makes it clear where Orwell got many of the ideas for "1984". During WWII, he worked for the British Ministry of Information. Part of his job was translating news reports into the Basic English 1000 word vocabulary, for transmission on the BBC to the colonies. Mostly India. He discovered that translation to Basic English is a political act. Basic English cannot express much ambiguity. So ambiguous political statements had to be hammered down into simple unambiguous statements.

   Hence Newspeak and the Ministry of Truth.

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2. poxwoleJan 2021
   Keep The Aspidistra Flying is my favorite Orwell book atleast his among his fiction. I have read it atleast thrice. Among the Non Fictions I loved Down and Out in Paris and London and Homage to Catalonia which is perhaps my favorite.
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3. mikorymJun 2020
   The content looks quite interesting for a mathematician too—so I'm sorry that the advertising needs to be antagonising.

   But even Keep the Aspidistra Flying was basically mutilated by circumstance [1] and it's still a great book. So, I'll take the insults towards mathematicians with humour and actually read some of it—I often switch between grumpy rigour to applicative speed. We all need to earn an income.

   [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_the_Aspidistra_Flying#Lit...

   Edit: Just to be clear, my comment on mathematicians is not on your quote, but this quote from OP's post:

   > an antidote to mathematical rigor mortis

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4. yetanotheraccDec 2015
   Absolutely amazing, changed the way I look at the society, will re-read:

   - George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

   Loved:

   - Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

   - Andy Weir, The Martian

   - Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

   - Greg Egan, Teranesia

   Liked:

   - Arthur C. Clarke, 3001: The Final Odyssey

   - Arthur C. Clarke, 2061: Odyssey Three

   - Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Laws

   - Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

   - Jonathan Slack, Stem Cells: A Very Short Introduction

   - John Scalzi, Fuzzy Nation (bought the audiobook for Wil Wheaton's narration)

   - Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center

   - Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space

   - David C. Cassidy, Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, and the Bomb

   Found full of BS, did not finish:

   - Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power

   Textbooks:

   - order of 10^3 pages of Open University textbooks

   - Klauber, Student Friendly Quantum Field Theory

   - Feynman & Hibbs, Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals

   - Wald, General Relativity (5 chapters)

   - Peskin & Schroeder, An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory (5 chapters)

   Not as bad as I felt before making the list, but underwhelming in terms of quantity. I intend to read a whole lot more in 2016.

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5. sireatOct 2010
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_the_Aspidistra_Flying

   was a book disowned by Orwell in later years (mostly because of editorial changes he was forced to make).

   Still, it is a good book to read on trappings of wealth and poverty.

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6. nopassrecoverAug 2010
   Some recents:

   Surely You're Joking Mr Feynmann is a good read.

   As is Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle

   As is Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller

   And I'm just getting into Orwell's Keep The Aspidistra Flying which is quite good too.

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