This is one of the first books I have read more than once. I first read "1984" in 1985 and now for the second time in 2018. The book has remained the same, but both the world and I have not. I cannot begin to convey how genuinely frightening this book is. I am a lover of popular science fiction and am astounded by Orwell's ability to be more compelling, entertaining and engrossing than authors with the benefit of light sabers, phasers and teleportation.
To every young person who has been assigned this book, know that you are reading a literary work of art. Many of you will understand and appreciate it, but if you love literature, please make a mental note to read this again when you are older. Youth brings with it eternal hope, boundless optimism and of course, hormones, so you will find yourself rebelling against the pessimism of the book itself - you will effectively be Winston raging against the machine, hoping, searching, questing for a way out. In short, you will cheat.
But when you get older, have a family, lose loved ones and see some of your dreams unfulfilled - when you witness entire nations and races of peoples born, live and die in brutal squalor - when you reflect on the technological advances made over the decades and gaze, with mouth agape, at how a people can be less advanced, less informed and less enlightened, not despite these innovations, but BECAUSE of them, then you will read 1984 as it was meant to be read...not as a dark, dystopian world you enter when you open the book, but a beautifully brutal warning that, even as you read it, is prophetically coming true around you.
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