The idea is to write a (snark-free) persuasive review every month—one designed to convince you to read a book that I not only loved but also was changed by.

I get recs all the time for “a good book” and “a fun read” but my attitude is: unless it’s one of the best books you’ve read in your life, keep it to yourself. There's plenty of Good Enough media out there—I only want to be suggested life-changers.

So that's what I'm attempting every month: if you've been convinced, please comment below and reward my efforts.

Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

This is very much a story about class. George Bowling is a salaryman. As a father and husband, he lives a middle-class life though he grew up in a working-class family. George was much happier as a boy with little than as a man with quite a bit. The question this book (implicitly, elegantly) explores is Why is that? Why doesn’t having more, moving up the social ladder, make for a “better” life?

Coming Up for Air is set in England between WWI and WWII (if you’re expecting an allegory or dystopia like 1984 or Animal Farm, this couldn’t be further from that). George uncharacteristically goes off-script: he takes off work, doesn’t tell his wife he’s departing, and goes to visit the small town he grew up in. Nothing crazy happens. No fireworks or dramatic reunions. George thinks about his life.

Part of him feels very lucky. He’s gotten more in life than he expected. But he also feels his life is anemic. If he’s so lucky—why does he romanticize his childhood? The prose is very conversational. Very readable. Not think-y (in fact, Orwell was criticized for fetishizing a Joe Schmo type) but somehow heartbreaking.

The part that got to me most was this bit about how when Geroge was a boy, he loved fishing. He'd arrange his days around going fishing. And he discovered this secret pond and, by a miracle, the grumpy old man who controlled access to it allowed him entry. It was the most perfect, serene arrangement and George went some four times in his youth. Just four times. But in his mind, those four times are his most powerful memory. They mean more to him than his wedding day or the birth of his children. He remembered fishing at the secret pond as if he went every single day for years. George reflects on how he loved fishing so much but, for whatever reason, hasn’t been since he was a kid.

This book has a bit of Fight Club in the sense of regular guy with a “good” job asking: Why do we choose to live this? Who says we have to? But more earnest. It's not snarky or wry or cynical or hopeless. The tone that is so finely balanced (I hope I can write like this one day). It’s uplifting but not in a Tuesdays with Morrie sense. It's nostalgic without being saccharine (like one of my other favorite books Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner). It has this hope-against-hope quality that gets conveyed even though a lot of George’s reflection is grim. What he’s pondering is how you accidentally become someone, or at least, how you end up with the type of life you never intended to have.

I think everyone above the age of twenty has a moment when they pause and wonder: how did I get here? Maybe it’s asked with gratitude, but (more often than not) I think it’s with consternation. Orwell uses this question to obliquely plumb where we get meaning from. Is it fishing? Is it friendship? Is it a keeping-up-with-the-joneses lifestyle? He doesn’t answer the question in this book—he just forces you to ask it of yourself.  

Imagine being young but old enough to experience and remember WWI—that means, in all likelihood, you also experience WWII. Yeah, so. Another way I could’ve described this book is: it’s about living through both WWI and WWII. How do you know what matters when everything is senseless violence?

Coming Up for Air falls well within my favorite type of story, which is a book about life. To be more specific, a deceptively simple book about life. Just an average guy doing that Accidental Wisdom thing. It’s Forrest Gump but make it literary.