1984 – George Orwell, 1949 ★★★

Why I Don't Love Big Brother

Here is a book so influential you don’t need to touch it to know its grisly details. So many immediate associations come thick and fast, from the title itself to terms like Big Brother, memory hole, and Thought Police.

As a political treatise, it long ago passed the test of greatness: People still talk about it. But how does 1984 hold up as a novel? Would it make sense if I told you I came away both overwhelmed and underimpressed?

The book is a sweeping indictment of collectivist authoritarianism, its target Marxist but vague enough to encompass other totalitarian philosophies. The term “Ingsoc” is rolled out often, suggesting that what we are seeing at work is not far off from present-day English socialism.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” Orwell writes. “It was their final, most essential command.”

Animal Farm – George Orwell, 1945 ★½

Grimm and Grimmer

Have you ever re-read one of those books they used to assign you back in school? Did you ever notice how almost-uniformly unpleasant they are to read today?

The Painted Bird is the most wretched of them, but there were a host of suicide stimuli on offer back in my day: The Lord Of The Flies, A Separate Peace, Crime And Punishment, The Bell Jar, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter and of course this story about what happens when an oppressed group of animals take over a farm.

Did they want to put us off reading forever? Did they want social media to take over the planet before it had even been invented?

Down And Out In Paris And London – George Orwell, 1933 ★★★

Before Becoming an Adjective

When your last name becomes an adjective, it means you left a mark. George Orwell has rare company that way, but when looking at his first book, the term Orwellian feels off.

Paranoia and a brooding kind of prescience are my standard Orwellian associations. They go out the window reading Down And Out In Paris And London, Orwell’s memoir of a destitute life in France and England. Big Brother is no longer watching; nobody even cares. Yet there are compensations. Given how dry and gloomy 1984 and Animal Farm are, I wasn’t expecting the humor or characterizations I got here.