Orange Crate Art: "Books v. Cigarettes"

Thursday, July 3, 2008

"Books v. Cigarettes"

George Orwell calculates the cost of a reading habit in the 1946 essay "Books v. Cigarettes":

[R]eading is one of the cheaper recreations: after listening to the radio probably the cheapest.

After reading this essay, I did some rough arithmetic and found that the cost of my Proust habit has been about 25¢ per reading hour. Cheap!

3 comments:

jJuly 04, 2008 5:56 AM
don't forget to add in the cost of bookcases and shelves. I'm careful about which books I buy. still, there are stacks (and I wish there were more). I'm an unrepentant stacker
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AnonymousJuly 04, 2008 3:14 PM
Incidentally, "Books v. Cigarettes" is getting re-released -- with a snazzy new cover no less -- as part of the third installment of Penguin's Great Ideas series of books.
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Michael LeddyJuly 04, 2008 3:39 PM
The shelves are long amortized, J. : )

Thanks for the link, Matt. The book is listed at Amazon UK with an August 7 publication date. I hope these Penguins show up in the States.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

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Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]

Heraclitus

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Every day is a new deal.

Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”

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Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again

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Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.

Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living

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I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.

J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction

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I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try

Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”

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L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]

Simone Weil, in a letter

Orange Crate Art

Thursday, July 3, 2008

"Books v. Cigarettes"

3 comments:

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