Are we what we read? asks George Orwell through four texts (Bookstore memories, Confessions of a Literary Critic, good bad books and Books or cigarettes) written and published between 1936 and 1946. I hope not, will answer the bookseller or the literary critic who reads too much or who reads badly. Orwell, who practiced both professions, speaks of it with a mixture of ferocity and humour, recounting, for example, having lost the love of books during the few months he was a bookseller: “The good smell of rotting paper lost its power of seduction. I now associate it too much with paranoid customers and dead flies. But sometimes reality, unfortunately, proves the visionary author of 1984 and of animal farm “Big corporations can never wipe out small independent bookstores like they did grocers and dairymen. »
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