I don't really know how to write this one as I am not really one of those who report on books.
Just wanna say to y'all who didn't read the book you should really go get it. It tells the story of a very dark world, where each uniqueness of our world is exaggerated and shaded, where all is inspected, monitored and controlled by a central authority. a centralized world, where nothing is beautiful but one thing - the common truth.
How does living in a world like this feels? How far fetched is this world from ours?
What is the nature of truth, and freedom?
These are my thoughts. hope that's working for you.
It's really quite a terrible book, by quite a terrible man. Yet there are many reasons why it is so highly regarded in our culture, primarily pertaining to its propaganda value.
1984 has become timeless and perpetually relevant. I'd also recommend Animal Farm if you haven't read it already. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (one of my favorite 20th-century science fiction authors) is also a great read that lives in a similar vein.
Breve New World is probably the most overrated Huxley book. Island is a much better summation of Huxley’s final perspective, and it is about as far from Brave New World as you can get. That said, I think BNW is still a good book, but it shouldn’t be seen as Huxley’s greatest work, nor did he see it as such.
A classic book with a central theme that remains relevant to this day. I think it gets interpreted far too literally and it has become a meme to suggest any rules you don't like are exactly like 1984.
The writing at times definitely reminds you it was written by a man in the 1950s though. I remember there being maybe 2 named female characters and only 1 has a decent amount of dialogue and she's a sex object the main character fantasizes about raping. Definitely doesn't pass the Bechdel test.
I didn’t like 1984, there are some cool ideas, but the book is horribly boring with characters that the author can’t get me to really care about. On top of that, I didn’t find it very well written and it seems to me that Orwell has some axe to grind that he can’t let go of, making the book feel a bit like a rant.
I agree that the characters weren't the most engaging, but to me the engaging part of the story was the description of the society itself. The characters were only there to give the reader a perspective to view the world from.
I don't care about boring films about boring books, I've despised Orwell's works since the moment I've read them when I was a liberal, because they are of poor quality. 1984 is even misogynous with its portrayal of the female character and the whole story is poorly written, as others have pointed out, there are better implementations of the same idea, such as a Brave New World.
I can't agree with that anymore. Art is inherently human, it's inherently individual. The person or people who make it put a piece of themselves into it. It's not possible to separate the art from the artist, and their human ideas, actions, motivations, and class.
In this case, Orwell wrote from a very personal perspective, so his works are intrinsically linked to his deeds and ideology as a human.
Was that supposed to be some sort of joke or do you actually not know Orwell himself was: a rapist, a snitch, a plagiarist, and a racist? One man, four horrible qualities.
I think there are many other versions of the same story that aren't plagiarized, aren't written by horrible humans, and are also better written.
Personally, I'm fond of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I haven't read it, but you can skip Orwell's plagiarizing and go to the source and read Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.
Never heard of Orwell plagiarizing 1984... I'll have to dig deeper thanks for the info! And 100% brave new world was such an amazing read... it was my first novel in like a decade after reading popular science books and it seriously got me thinking.