Nineteen Eighty-Four became an instant bestseller when it was published 70 years ago at the beginning of the Cold War, and it has remained a perennial favorite, selling an estimated 40 million copies worldwide. Its title, of course, has become synonymous with totalitarianism, political doublespeak and the loss of individual rights and freedoms. In the weeks following the 2017 presidential inauguration, sales of the book rose an estimated 950% in the U.S.—yet it is perhaps singular among books in that its dystopian warnings have been embraced and exploited by both the left and the right. The fascinating origins and complex legacy of this enduring masterwork are chronicled in an arresting new book, On Nineteen Eighty-Four, by Whitbread Award-winning biographer D.J. Taylor.

Dividing the narrative into three sections—before, during and after—Taylor first considers the man, born Eric Blair in British-occupied India, who reinvented himself as George Orwell, a progressive journalist and novelist who struggled for book sales. He also struggled with poor health and, by the time he was writing the book that became Nineteen Eighty-Four in the mid-1940s, was wracked with the debilitating symptoms of tuberculosis. After the death of his wife, he took his very young son to live on Jura, a remote island in the Hebrides, where the weather was hardly conducive to curing an insidious lung disease. Many days he could not get out of bed, much less write. But he pushed on for months and years, eventually producing a manuscript that expressed his terrifying vision of a possible future, in some ways recognizable as postwar London. As Taylor recounts the harrowing details of Orwell’s physical decline, he contemplates how his state of mind, in the end, may have shaped that vision.

Seven months after the book was published, Orwell died, missing the chance to enjoy the financial prosperity that eluded him for his whole life. The book, however, did not die. On the contrary, it quickly took on a life of its own, and in the latter part of his engaging account, Taylor considers the ways Nineteen Eighty-Four has been interpreted (often misinterpreted) and has influenced our culture. He points to “the novel’s versatility, its continuing relevance to a world that Orwell had no way of foreseeing. As time moved on, then so did the prism through which critics—and ordinary readers—tended to regard it.” 

As we navigate our own often  Orwellian reality of autocracy, political discontent and crafted truths, Taylor ponders what the great writer might have made of “alternative facts” and those who embrace them. The answer, he suggests, is not a simple one.

It’s hardly surprising that a recent spate of books has lamented the lost art of book-reading in our distracted digital age. Writers and readers know best what such a loss could mean. 

But when Leah Price, a professor of literature and the history of books, began exploring the subject, she discovered that our perceptions of a glorious past of reading books are not entirely accurate. The way we read now hasn’t changed as much as we might think. In What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading, Price counters the biblio-doomsayers with an incisive look at what the archives reveal about books and reading—then, now and moving forward.

In her professional capacity, Price has spent plenty of time among the dusty, forgotten vestiges of the reading past. She’s scrutinized the marginalia in antique school primers and the fingerprint stains on old library books. Studying books can make it hard to venerate texts, Price writes. She’s discovered, for instance, that in old copies of Samuel Richardson’s 18th-century doorstop of a novel Clarissa, the sex scenes are often well-thumbed, while long passages describing pastoral landscapes are in pristine condition. This would suggest that our romanticized reader of the past was just as prone to skimming for the “good bits”—21st-century eBooks just make the process a little easier.

Pundits have been writing about some version of the book’s demise since at least the 19th century, Price finds. But in truth, the future of literacy doesn’t hinge on “whether we read in print or online or in some as-yet-unimagined medium but rather [on] the interactions through which we get our hands on books—and even more fundamentally, the interactions that awaken a desire for them.” Ultimately, she believes the experience of immersing oneself in a world made of words can only survive if readers continue to carve out the places and times to have words with one another.

Price takes this affectionate study of the history and future of reading in many disparate directions. She ventures into both contemporary psychiatry and the modern-day “archeology” of preserving and exploring Harvard’s remote library stacks. She takes us across centuries to the time of religious scribes, the innovations of Gutenberg and the digital success of Fifty Shades of Grey. She contemplates the reality that the challenge of reading today is not the availability of books, as it once was, but finding the time to read.

Eye-opening and filled with delightful nuggets of truth, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books offers no nostalgia for a more tranquil reading past but rather a hopeful glimpse into an essential reading future.

F. Scott Fitzgerald never wrote an autobiography, although readers can feel his presence in the guises of his stand-in narrators, not least of all Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. As the pre-eminent chronicler of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald—born 115 years ago on September 24—freely borrowed from his own experiences, as well as those of his wife, Zelda, and many of his friends, in writing his evocative fiction. Twice during the last decade of his life, Fitzgerald did consider putting together a collection of some nonfiction pieces he had written for magazines, but as editor James L.W. West III tells us in his introduction to A Short Autobiography, the idea was shot down by legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins. 

Seventy-some years after Fitzgerald’s untimely death, West has at last realized a version of the writer’s intention. Though not by any measure an autobiography (the title for the book is taken from one of the shorter pieces—a pithy catalog of a year’s drinking that ran in The New Yorker in 1929), this charming compilation of unfamiliar pieces does manage to provide an illuminating and varied portrait of the writer and the man. The essays span the length of Fitzgerald’s relatively short career, beginning in 1920 and ending with a piece he was writing at the time of his death.

A Jazz Age icon tells his own story.

The earliest essays in the book have an archness befitting the undoubtedly cocky young man who took the literary world by storm with his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Two companion essays, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year” and “How to Live on Practically Nothing,” published less than six months apart in two 1924 issues of the Saturday Evening Post, are brilliant, tongue-in-cheek depictions of his and Zelda’s spendthrift ways. With a similar self-aware insouciance, albeit one tempered by age and professional disappointment, “One Hundred False Starts” (1933) will speak to anyone who has put pen to paper. “An Author’s Mother,” from 1936, though couched as a story about someone else, undoubtedly reflects the painful truth that his own mother never accepted his chosen profession as respectable: “An author was something distinctly peculiar—there had been only one in the Middle Western city where she was born and he had been regarded as a freak.”

There are repetitions and recurring themes, understandable since these pieces were written independently over many years and, given the nature of magazine pieces, regarded as largely disposable. Fitzgerald reiterates the idea that his generation was soft, the result of having been raised predominantly by mothers. His views on modern “girls” are complicated at best, wavering between admiration and disapproval. A piece about Prince­ton and another written after the death of his father, both published posthumously, underscore a nostalgia for a certain American gentility that he sees as a vague memory.

One of the finest pieces is the last, “My Generation,” not published until 1968. Those who hold dear the story and literature of what Gertrude Stein dubbed “The Lost Generation” will welcome Fitzgerald’s retrospective take on his World War I compatriots, trudging reluctantly into middle age, still holding onto an America that has disappeared. “So we inherited two worlds,” he writes, “the one of hope to which we had been bred; the one of disillusion which we had discovered early for ourselves. And that first world was growing as remote as another country, however close in time.” An imitable Fitzgerald passage, to be sure.

Quite simply, Christian Wiman’s He Held Radical Light is a beautiful book, floating as it does on elegant, lyrical prose. Wiman seeks to glimpse the ways that art and faith reflect and tangle with each other, and in doing so he offers graceful meditations on the poetry of A.R. Ammons, Mary Oliver, Philip Larkin and Donald Hall, among others.

After a meeting with Seamus Heaney that is marked as much by silence as words, Wiman recalls that the poet’s work “could . . . take that inchoate edge of existence and give it actual edges. He could bring the cosmic into the commonplace. . . . He could make matter, inside the space of a poem, immortal, or make the concept of eternity, in more than one sense, matter.” After a frustrating week of trying to write poetry, Wiman grabs a copy of Don Quixote from his bookshelf, losing himself for three days in its prose and story; he then emerges to discover that the “existential key to his soul had been unlocked.” Reflecting on this moment, he shares his insights into faith and art: “It has been my experience that faith, like art, is most available when I cease to seek it, cease even to believe in it, perhaps, if by belief one means that busy attentiveness, that purposeful modern consciousness that knows its object.” Wiman reveals that faith and art give form to feelings that are incipient, and they offer us a means “whereby we can inhabit our fear and pains rather than they us, to help us live with our losses rather than being permanently and helplessly haunted by them.”

Luminous and moving, He Held Radical Light brilliantly reveals the inextricable bonds of poetry and faith, and it serves as an evocative companion to Wiman’s 2013 memoir, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer.

How can a dictator hide in plain sight, telegraphing evil intentions years or even decades after their demise? Daniel Kalder posits that it’s simple: Many of them left behind a body of literature. Kalder, a journalist who lived in Moscow for 10 years, immersed himself in “dictator literature” and has collected his analyses of their often terrible writing and its consequences in The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy. As it turns out, in addition to being despots and practitioners of genocide, dictators are typically megalomaniacs who like to put their thoughts on paper for posterity.

Kalder started reading the works of dictators around 2011 and somehow managed to finish the requisite reading and complete his own book within the decade. To say this was a tall task would be an understatement—there has been no lack of dictators in the course of human history—but Kalder delivers with this entertaining and highly informative book. It helps that he keeps his sense of humor. “Dictators usually live lives that are rich in experience,” he deadpans early on, and the quips are sprinkled throughout (including a shot at everyman author Bill Bryson). Given the subject matter, they are never unwelcome.

As for the dictator-authors, it’s safe to say there are no Brysons among them. Mussolini comes off best in terms of writing skill (“borders on the readable”), while Hitler (“staggeringly incompetent”) takes a pounding. Kalder then dutifully leads us through the writings of Mao Tse-tung, Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini and a few lesser-known despots. There’s a handy summary at the end in which Kalder also considers the impact of social media and warns—perhaps more aptly than he realized when writing this book—about the ability to “wage war . . . through the medium of text.”

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.