Seemed like an appropriate last book to close the year of 2016. I first read 1984 in the year 1984, but I was only 12 then, so rereading it now gave a much deeper appreciation for the depth of Orwell's insight. If you'd asked me 10 years ago I would have said Brave New World had come closer to anticipating our modern problems, but after watching the proponents of Brexit and the Trump campaign flat out lie and deny the truth with no accountability or consequence, I'm no longer so sure that Orwell didn't come closer to the mark. Considering the book was written in 1948, that's no small feat.

Two quotes that struck me as particularly relevant:

"Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."

"DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them ... DOUBLETHINK lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word DOUBLETHINK it is necessary to exercise DOUBLETHINK. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of DOUBLETHINK one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."