The Book That Changed My Life: 'Little Women' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'

 Amy Wilson-Smith

Little Women by Louise M Alcott

I was forced, and when I say forced I mean shut in the receiving lounge of our house (normally only reserved for high days, holidays and very special guests) one hour every day for a week until I read the book. This sounds all very draconian – I was 11 and my formidable English teacher had told my parents that I showed potential for English, but would not progress unless I began to read ‘decent books’. And so it was. I hated the first two chapters (it’s a slow burner this book) and then Laurie appeared in Chapter Three to cheer up all the sisters (and me) and then the fun really begins. On the Thursday of the fateful ‘forced reading’ week, they could not get me out of the room.

A semi-autobiographical book, at its heart it’s a book about relationships, family and coming of age. There are very funny parts, as they get into all manner of bother and there are some heart wrenching moments, that I remember catching my breath over and feeling like my heart might actually break. It doesn’t sugar coat life, but I really felt I was one of the sisters. The sometimes difficult, old-fashioned vocabulary melted away as it became all about the story .

Up until this point I enjoyed books, but Little Women was the first time I realised a book really can take you to a different place. The more I read, the  more I was exhausted by the drama of it, but I couldn’t wait to read on. It hooked me into reading, I needed to find more books that would make me feel like that and I still look forward to the thrill of a fantastic book each holiday today.

Less well known is that it’s part of a series with Good Wives, Little Men and Jo’s Boys following, all of which I adored, particularly the last. It was my Harry Potter; I was devastated when I realised there were no more!

Simon Lemieux

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell 

This is probably the book, when growing up as a teenager, that had a profound impact on me. Yes, 1984 was still a date slightly in the future then, but only just. Firstly I enjoyed the escapism of a world in the future so that certainly appealed to me, as nightmarish as it was in his depiction. But more so, it made me think about how states could misuse their power to control people. Constant supervision, the dangers of  the cult of personality, big brother, Room 101 and doublethink but above all, one man, the chief protagonist Winston Smith who questioned it all, and began to doubt the authority of the party. In many ways, I guess it was my ‘coming of age’ book, encouraging me to be a freethinker, my own person and slightly contrarian..... or so my teenage self liked to think. Ironically, I never studied Hitler or Stalin for O level or A level history – I seem to recall a lot about Robert Walpole, Corn Laws, the English Civil War and 17^th/18^th century European history, but Orwell’s take on totalitarianism stuck with me.

I also went on to read more of his works: Animal Farm, Down and Out in London and Paris (an O level set text for English Lit if I recall correctly – can still remember the word 'plongeur'), and, later on, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia. I think what I most admire in Orwell, aside from his independence of thought, albeit from a certain ideological standpoint, not my own, is firstly his brevity and economy of words. For lazy readers like myself, that’s always a bonus! Secondly, his work hasn’t really dated. Like the best plays and TV sitcoms and much else besides, his oeuvre has stood the test of time remarkably well. There was a time, perhaps in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War, when what he was writing and warning against seemed increasingly irrelevant. Alas, we can no longer be quite so smug..