Some Thoughts on The Common Toad by George Orwell is the thirty first of The Essays - you find this collection in the 917th place on The Greatest Books of All Time site, nevertheless, the algorithm changes the places in the hierarchy, ergo you could see a different structure, I don’t know what data is used, however, if it takes into account the ‘reading public’, then the chefs d’oeuvre will descend from the top spots, and the likes of The Da Vinci Code will dominate the front rows, and they will become the “GOAT” – that notwithstanding, you have more than five thousand reviews on books from the aforementioned site and others, with notes on films from The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made and other lists waiting for you on my blog and YouTube channel https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html if you are interested

 

Some Thoughts on The Common Toad by George Orwell is the thirty first of The Essays - you find this collection in the 917th place on The Greatest Books of All Time site, nevertheless, the algorithm changes the places in the hierarchy, ergo you could see a different structure, I don’t know what data is used, however, if it takes into account the ‘reading public’, then the chefs d’oeuvre will descend from the top spots, and the likes of The Da Vinci Code will dominate the front rows, and they will become the “GOAT” – that notwithstanding, you have more than five thousand reviews on books from the aforementioned site and others, with notes on films from The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made and other lists waiting for you on my blog and YouTube channel https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html if you are interested

 

 

The Essays of Geroge Orwell https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/10/decline-of-english-murder-by-george.html are fantastic, and alas, they will soon be over for this reader, I have read thirty one now, and that means about twenty hours of listening to the mesmerizing audio book, and there are only about five hours left

 

I agree with Geroge Orwell completely on the main issue of Some Thoughts on The Common Toad, incidentally, I was not worried about a text dealing with such small, neglected (as the author indeed says) animal, I have a couple in the small ‘pond’ in the garden, perhaps three-square meters in area, and I like them so much

 

Superman that I am, I saved one from the cats, there are more than ten cats roaming here – I can see that this is moving away from the Essay, and the lines will be about how I enjoyed nature, and not what Orwell has to say about it, he is right, pleasures of nature do not cost anything, and things have changed in the meantime

In this essay, we read that decades ago, there was a backlash when nature was celebrated, because it was conserved passe, retrograde, that was the age of the machine, why talk about soil and flowers, when they had to admire progress, that would be the cars and the rest of it, we have seen the pollution and Climate Change

 

Unless of course, we are not from the MAGA https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/fear-trump-in-white-house-by-bob.html lunatic asylum, those hoodlums deny that the planet is warming, have promoted this fool at the top of the free world, are against vaccines, but for a deluge of machine guns, and so much more

Let me stop this, before it gets me in trouble again: believing in freedom of expression, I had this attitude in my notes, and then some MAGA hated it, flagged me, and I got kicked out of Goodreads, where I used to have more than four thousand reviews, I had to return, and to work a lot to get them back from my blogs

 

Indeed, now there are more than three thousand on my profile, but it took many days to get there, and besides, a thousand or so may be gone, I am still digging, but new ‘gems’ are harder to find- and now for my love of nature, which is so similar to what George Orwell expressed in his Some Thoughts on The Common Toad

My daughter was born in 2001, she was just a few months old when 9/11 happened, and we saw this in the middle of…Nature, well sort of, we had just moved to Rasnov aka Rosenau, a small town in the middle of Romania, some 160 kilometers north of Bucharest, we had abandoned the capital and chose the forest

 

It is true that we had been forced to a great extent – there is a sort of a spoiler alert many lines above, when I realized I digress or worse, so you had been warned, in case you are thinking of having me banned, again 😊- because we had stayed in the center of the capital, in my mother’s flat, and spend a lot to upgrade it

Only she decided at the end of this massive, exorbitant (with hindsight, and knowing the result) operation to have us out, so we little money left, we could not buy, or do something worthwhile in the big city and thus settled in the ‘countryside’, there will be more about this in future notes, meaning less about the subject and more about innuendo

 

Now for my standard closing of the note with a question, and invitation – I am on Goodreads as Realini Ionescu, at least for the moment, if I keep on expressing my views on Orange Woland aka TACO, it may be a short-lived presence

Also, maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the benefits from it, other than the exercise per se

 

 There is also the small matter of working for AT&T – this huge company asked me to be its Representative for Romania and Bulgaria, on the Calling Card side, which meant sailing into the Black Sea wo meet the US Navy ships, travelling to Sofia, a lot of activity, using my mother’s two bedrooms flat as office and warehouse, all for the grand total of $250, raised after a lot of persuasion to the staggering $400…with retirement ahead, there are no benefits, nothing…it is a longer story, but if you can help get the mastodont to pay some dues, or have an idea how it can happen, let me know

 

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html

 

Some favorite quotes from To The Hermitage and other works

 

‘Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life...As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality...Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…’

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