His other novels are all interesting, amusing, and sometimes more: in particular, the melancholic autobiographical Keep the Aspidistra Flying and the sweltering if somewhat undercooked Burmese Days are well worth there place in print all these years later, though they remain there largely due to the success of an allegorical fable and a piece of dystopian sci-fi, the import of each neglected and subsumed by the system that routinely teaches our children how to misread them.
However, it's Orwell's non-fiction that really made him an important force--not "merely" a writer--in the 20th century. Is there any more important writer of non-fiction? Let me know if you think so. Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia and The Road to Wigan Pier are three of the best and most significant works of literature in the last hundred years and more. If anybody disagrees, we can go a few rounds.
Though most of his books have been widely available, and never to my knowledge out of print in his own UK (which god knows has better reason that anybody else to hate him back) many of his essays and in particular his more ephemeral writings (book reviews, columns, etc.) remained in large part uncollected. (I'll just mention here that there's a really interesting group of notes, transcripts and the like available from his time at the BBC--at the goddamn BBC!--you can still pick up 2nd hand. I actually bought a copy in Oklahoma City once, so that should give you an idea.)
This collection, published a few years ago in the US and I have no idea when in the UK, remedies this situation for the most part--it even goes so far as to include an unfinished article/essay sniping at Evelyn Waugh and his puny, hollow Catholicism. Good stuff. No doubt the fact that he was unable to complete it on his deathbed will be found reassuring to clerical child-rapists, their supporters, those who encourage the spread of AIDS in the Third World (yes, Third World, not "Global South") through the discouragement of safe sex, and that gay-hating fop, formerly of the Wehrmacht (unfair of me, I know, but the rest isn't), now prancing in robes under the soubriquet Benedict XVI. But what should one expect from sequels?
Alas, I digress. Although Orwell's essays are hardly unknown, and some of them ("Shooting an Elephant", "A Hanging", and esp. "Politics and the English Language") are among the most influential models of the form, much of what he produced is neglected. And produce much he did, as one ought to expect from an acknowledged past-master of something relatively brief and financially viable: my edition, published by that the always wonderful and beautiful Everyman's Library, runs to 1370 pages--longer or nearly as long as many editions of the Bible. Fittingly.
In particular, I'd like to draw people's attention to "Confessions of a Book Reviewer", "Are Books Too Dear?", "Raffles and Miss Blandish", "You and the Atom Bomb", "Boys' Weeklies", and "Inside the Whale". Oh yes, and all the others. Fortunately for those who can't just take my word for it and pay the $40.00 or whatever the book costs now, all this and much, much more (as Laurie Taylor says) is available here (sadly, it is no longer a pirate Russian site mirroring the material out of the Western copywright orbit...).
Before I go, maybe I should say actually why everybody should read George Orwell's essays. To be honest, I feel like the case shouldn't have to be made to any sane, democratically-minded human being. There being an unfortunate dearth of such individuals, esp. in my neck of the woods, I'll just say this, briefly: Orwell brought a new kind of conscience and moral seriousness combined with genuinely great prose style to a journalistic situation that badly needed them, at a crucial moment in history.
But his work needs to be reread today because so many of his analyses shine light on our modern political situations and the danger of both the right and the left, and point out the shell game played between the "extremes" by parties of power, esp. in countries like his and mine.
Not much has changed, and not much has stayed the same. Orwell keeps us on our toes, ready for action, ready to challenge received notions, whether they be the intelligentsia's love affair with Soviet Russia in the 30s or the use of scare-words like "terrorism" as a means of compelling consent in democratic societies today.
P.S. I'd just like to say that on my desk sits a small collection of books used for reference, though I suppose I'm maintaining an anachronism by using, for example, printed atlases. Let the future judge me, as I'm sure it will judge us all. Anyway, included in this group are: a relatively recent edition of Webster's, the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Cassell's Latin Dictionary, Eco's The Open Work, and a few others. One of these others, and the one I have read and carried with me the most in my life, is my Everyman's edition of Orwell's Essays. It's that good and that important, that I consider a book made up to a large extent of stuff published in long-defunct newspapers and magazines to be an essential reference for my life. Please. Do. Read it.
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