88 pages
Published March 2, 2008 by Pearson Education ESL.
Winston Smith lives in a society where the government controls people every second of the day. He fights this world with love. But it's dangerous: love for another person can be punished by death - and Big Brother is always watching.
Orwell's classic story shows that there is no freedom unless ideas and beliefs can be questioned. This is as true today as when it was written, more than fifty years ago. --back cover
Yeah, I mean, pretty good. Not amazeballs good, but I find I have a tendency to not appreciate the most popular of books. Does a good job of taking the principals of authoritarianism and turning them up to one hundred. It also does a good job of refusing to ascribe any meaning to the authoritarians, so that the reader can't learn anything other than "it's the authoritarian system that is bad, not it's started purpose."
Content warning Second paragraph details my opinion on the ending.
It's amazing how much of this book still can be compared to our current situations across multiple countries. The constant surveillance part is still a scary threat we live with today.
1984 gave me the same feeling I've had reading other not-so-happy books where the climax and falling action are pulling you through the pages because you don't know how the author is going to write the character out of the situation. And then the ending finally leaves you feeling underwhelmed and defeated. It's definitely a book you need to sit and think with. I'd encourage anyone who read this in high school give it a second read as an adult with more life experience to draw experience from.
Perhaps if I had read this at high school or at uni it would have had more of an effect on me. Although I like the genre, and other works by Orwell, I feel like I waited too long to read this one it came off as just...meh.
