Just finished reading . . .

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

This is such an important book. I wonder what it was like to read it in 1937 when it was first published? Was it shocking? George Orwell, self-defined as lower-upper-class spent time researching and living with miners' families in Wigan during the depression years in the 1930s.

The book still has so much relevance for today. It should be compulsory reading in schools. His chapters made me understand, a little better, mining communities (and the mass destruction carried out by Margaret Thatcher and her government), unemployment and the damage that it does to individuals and to communities, poverty, poor housing (and the importance of council housing), the class divide and the North-South divide.
I realised, as I read, that my mother was one of the Northern town cotton mill workers that he describes, living in a 4 roomed house, in a family of about 9 children plus parents). She was 22 in 1937, and, according to Orwell, probably being paid less than 30 shillings a week.
There are those, in the early 21st century, who argue that the term 'class' is no longer relevant. I stopped listening to the Archers on Radio 4 a while ago because it became clear to me that the scripts are written from the premise that the low-paid, non-land-owning characters (such as the Grundies) are there to be laughed at, or pitied, or vilified for their various money-making schemes and scams. Meanwhile there is a clear dominance of middle (and upper) class characters whose lives we are really supposed to be following. Orwell made me think of this in one of his paragraphs, with a very accurate description of how the working classes are regarded by the middle classes in 1930s Britain.
Now I'll stop ranting and confess that I didn't read the last two chapters, in which he is analysing why, in Europe at that time, fascism was gaining more support than socialism. After writing this book, he went off to join the International Brigade, fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War. I got irritated with some of his sweeping generalisations about 'types' of people, which didn't hit my early 21st century sensibilities easily.
9 out of 10
There is a link to the last book I read - The Children's Book, by AS Byatt, which chronologically falls just a before The Road to Wigan Pier. It is difficult for a middle/upper class Communist (Charles/Karl, in the Children's Book) to mix and talk with the working classes.

Now, what shall I read next? I might go for total garbage.