Bayley’s Bookshelf - Great Audiobooks

"2 + 2 = 5. "They can't get inside you," she had said. But they could get inside you. "What happens to you here is forever," O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could not recover. Something was killed in your breast; burnt out, cauterized out."   The final chapter of George Orwell's dystopian nightmare masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Listen t...

"You asked me once," said O'Brien, "what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world." The penultimate chapter of the increasingly non-fiction 1984. Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast   You can also support this podcast w...

"For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name. From now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up i...

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like to send correspondence for me to read and discuss during an episode, or...

"We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked t...

"Sometimes with a fading hope he thought of O'Brien and the razor blade. It was thinkable that the razor blade might arrive concealed in his food, if he were ever fed. More dimly he thought of Julia. Somewhere or other she was suffering, perhaps far worse than he. She might be screaming with pain at this moment." You know it's grimdark when your clinging onto the hope of being snuck a razorblade....

"It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people who had never learned...

"And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years—imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the deportation of whole populations—not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people...

"You are prepared to give your lives?" "Yes." "You are prepared to commit murder?" "Yes." "To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?" "Yes." "To betray your country to foreign powers?" "Yes." "You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate ve...

"When once they get hold of us there will be nothing, literally nothing, that either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they'll shoot you, and if I refuse to confess they'll shoot you just the same. Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying, will put off your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of us will even know whether the other is alive or dead." Thank you Learned...

"It had happened at last. The expected message had come. All his life, it seemed to him, he had been waiting for this to happen." Thank you Learned Librarian Patreon: Jon Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If...

"Often they gave themselves up to daydreams of escape. Their luck would hold indefinitely, and they would carry on their intrigue, just like this, for the remainder of their natural lives. Or Katharine would die, and by subtle maneuverings Winston and Julia would succeed in getting married. Or they would commit suicide together. Or they would disappear, alter themselves out of recognition, learn t...

"Rats!" murmured Winston. "In this room!" "They're all over the place," said Julia indifferently as she lay down again. "We've even got them in the kitchen at the hostel. Some parts of London are swarming with them. Did you know they attack children? Yes, they do. In some of these streets a woman daren't leave a baby alone for two minutes. It's the great huge brown ones that do it. And the nasty t...

"The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be...

"I hated the sight of you," he said. "I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone. If you really want to know, I imagined that you had something to do with the Thought Police." The girl laughed delightedly..." Thank you Learned Librarian Patreon: Jon Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreo...

"He did not know why the Thought Police should choose to deliver their messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons. The thing that was written on the paper might be a threat, a summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some description. But there was another, wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though he tried vainly to suppress it. This was, that the message did...

"The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedly some people did so. Many of the disappearances were actually suicides. But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and certain poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body...

"It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus...

I love it when main characters have unlikable aspects to them. Not every lead character needs to a best mate you want to go to the pub with. Travis Bickle isn't. They just need to be compelling. Thank you Learned Librarian Patreon: Jon I love it when main characters have unlikable aspects to them. Not every lead character needs to a best mate you want to go to the pub with. Travis Bickle isn't. Th...

Thank you Learned Librarian Patreon: Jon This is happening now, we're just running a few decades late. Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like to send correspondence for me to read and discuss during...

Thank you Learned Librarian Patreon: Jon Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like to send correspondence for me to read and discuss during an episode, or you would like to talk about me narrating your...

This is proving remarkably popular at the moment, particularly in the U.S. for some reason... Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like to send correspondence for me to read and discuss during an episo...

I actually started laughing when I was mastering this. It's just so well written, it's almost absurd. I cannot believe how well written this is. It's madness. Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like...

The start of a seminal, monumental, book, perhaps more relevant and important now than ever. Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like to send correspondence for me to read and discuss during an episod...

For a historically accurate listen. Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like to send correspondence for me to read and discuss during an episode, or you would like to talk about me narrating your own...