This book is great, but often misinterpreted. I think any thoughts I have on it are really preempted well by Pynchon's foreword:

"Prophecy and prediction are not quite the same... specific predictions are only details, after all. What is perhaps more important, indeed necessary, to a working prophet, is to be able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul. Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that far from having seen its day it had perhaps not yet even come into its own- the corruption of the spirit, the irresistible human addiction to power, were already long in place, all well-known aspects of the third Reich and Stalin's USSR, even the British Labour Party- like first drafts of a terrible future. What could prevent the same thing from happening to Britain and the United States? Moral superiority? Good intentions? Clean living?" ( )

4 stars for its literary quality, 5 stars for its importance. A must-read! ( )

dnf at 44% because i can't keep pretending to tolerate how the protagonist speaks about women. like, sir, you do deserve those varicose veins.

I have now read this book as an adult and like it even less than I did when I was required to read it in high school. Of course I read it because people have been talking about how this is going to be our way of life under the current presidency, and after reading it again, I totally understand that those people obviously never read the book. People are pulling at straws, creating more fake news and screaming for attention. I'm over it. ( )

Like so many others, I first read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in high school as a class assignment. For me, the actual year 1984 was a few years in the future and it was one of my first dystopian novels. My memory of it included the phrases of "Big Brother" and the "thought police" and the overwhelming bleak state of the world where authoritarianism has been taken to an extreme and where no one can hide from its control.

The recent rise of authoritarianism in world politics and most relevant, the rise of MAGA and Trumpism in the United States, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has returned to the best seller list as people are seeing the eerie similarities in the dystopian novel and our own current events. Many commentators have used the phrase, "Orwellian" to refer to these similarities.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has been on my TBR list for a couple of years, but I couldn’t bring myself to read such a depressing book during the height of the pandemic. I recently found the Audible audiobook with Simon Preble as narrator. Simon does an excellent job using his strong voice that goes well with the subject matter. His reading style offers a good treatment of the book and is easy on the ears.

In re-reading this book after over 40 years, I realized that either my memory of the book has faded quite a bit or that I didn’t absorb the full story in my original reading. It actually might be a combination of both. This is why it is a great idea to re-read classics - you will have a much richer reading experience and appreciation for the book when reading from the perspective of your current self.

Eric Arthur Blair used the pen name of George Orwell in his writing career, though most of us only know him by his pen name. Orwell had already seen the success of his earlier book, Animal Farm (1945) and other works by the time he worked on writing Nineteen Eighty-Four(1949). It is worth noting that while writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, he was battling serious medical conditions, including tuberculosis and he died within a year of its publication at the age of 46.

Orwell, a democratic socialist, used his storytelling as a warning against authoritarianism and the ultimate direction to extreme totalitarianism where all aspects of life are controlled. Orwell described a society where Big Brother is always watching. The Party controls all records, history, language and communication and compliance is enforced by the Thought Police. Thoughtcrimes are anything that is not in line with the propaganda provided by the Party with the penalty of death. Once vaporized, references to them are removed from any past publications and records and they cease to exist. People are forbidden to mention their names.

Propaganda posters appear everywhere with the phrase, “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” The Party’s slogan is added: "WAR IS PEACE", "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY", "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH". The government is set up with several ministries that are named in exact opposition to their function. The Ministry of Peace deals with war; the Ministry of Plenty, scarcity, rations, and starvation; Ministry of Truth, propaganda, lies, and thought control, and Ministry of Love, with torture, confession re-education and/or death.

Doublethink is a term that is used to explain how people are expected to not use logic when holding onto beliefs. The Party expects people to accept conflicting views as both true. As an example, 2 2=5, if the Party says so or 2 2=4 is also true in some possible cases.

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed— if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. �Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, �controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. �Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, �doublethink’.” (p 44)

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a true classic and Orwell’s powerful warnings against authoritarianism are delivered in a sobering way. Even more disturbing is how this parallels our current events where the MAGA and Trump loyalists use similar language in supporting propaganda. The rewriting of history and current events with “alternative” facts, banning books, seeking to control textbooks to blot out references to unfavorable events - as if they didn’t happen - is straight out of this playbook.

If you had read Nineteen Eighty-Four in high school, this is definitely worth a re-read. ( )