I also finished Down and Out in Paris and London today, my 10th book of 2026! This was book number 7 off my physical TBR, leaving 28 to go!

Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell, is a surprising partially-true account of Orwell's time with little money in the titular cities. For me, it was a 3 star book.

While Orwell tells some interesting stories, the nature of the book just doesn't bring the entire story together enough to be extremely intriguing to me.

Despite this, I found it interesting to look at both how different being poor is in modern America to how the book describes it, but also how similar. The homeless of this novel and of today are forced to be mobile, their existence in certain areas are illegal, which means they can't hold down a job because they can't stop moving, and they can't stop moving because they can't hold down a job.

As Orwell proposes, there are simple solutions to some of the problems we see with poverty, but people who have never been poor think of the homeless as monsters, think of begging as a sin, think of the unemployed as lazy, when the root of these problems is more those thoughts than anything else.

It's a great book, just not a great one for me. If you're interested in social change, I would absolutely recommend.

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