A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick With extraordinary relevance and renewed popularity, George Orwell’s 1984 takes on new life in this edition. “Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.”—The New Yorker In 1984, London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania where … city in the totalitarian state of Oceania where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.
Lionel Trilling said of Orwell’s masterpiece, “1984 is a profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book. It is a fantasy of the political future, and like any such fantasy, serves its author as a magnifying device for an examination of the present.” Though the year 1984 now exists in the past, Orwell’s novel remains an urgent call for the individual willing to speak truth to power.
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Tragic but too close to reality
Read this in High School and loved it. Re-read it again years later. Very relevant today for obvious reasons. Whatever your political persuasion, it is still worth reading.
A must-read and re-read for these days.
This was a book that was written to be a self defeating property. In 1984, that seemed to be clear. Today, I feel, that things have become worse than they were 20 years ago in this space.
It is more topical today than it was 20-30 years ago. It is worth a read. Don’t let this be one of the great books that you have not read.
When this was written i was probably very scary, now you can look at it and see that it doesn’t go far enough.
classic…..
Scariest book ever
While this book is a classic of Cold War Literature, the look at Stalinism spread to England post-WWII and around the world is a poor fit to our 24/7 connected, Insults-as-Free Speech world. Dictators no longer use the heavy-jackbooted methods this novel’s Evil Communist Rulers employ – though the violence is just as horrible and the stifling of …
Where Trump is taking us
The characters are emotionally unstable, but the author portrays it as normal. If teenagers read this and think being this obsessed with another person is the norm, then they will be in for a disappointment.
Frightening and prophetic.
This is anticommunist and anti-despotic propaganda. It has fabulous character studies, beautiful language (probably why modern literati still recommend it), and a totally unrealistic plot, imaginary society and technology (lousy world-building). It makes obvious moral points in obvious ways. When it was written, it was a crucial part of the …