Should I read 1984?

The long and short of it: Yes
When was it made: 1949

Written by George Orwell, this book is the probably the best known of the dystopian future trifecta. It is a critique of solid modernity (to borrow a phrase from Zygmunt Bauman) and a great example of a disciplinary society: in other words, people immediately think you're smarter if you've read it. This book was nothing like I expected it to be, and I enjoyed it because of that. Mr. Orwell spent a great deal of time building up his world and how it worked, and it comes through in the book, especially in the first part of the book which deals largely with how the world works. I listened to an unabridged audiobook, but I should have read it-I had to stop and go back so many times to re-hear the particularly interesting tidbits like I so often do when reading that it probably would have been faster. I lost track of time often, and lost a few hours of sleep to this book.

Odds are if you have completed high school you have either read this book or A Brave New World. It is considered a must read by most literary circles do to the possibility that such a future might come into being, and in fact some of the polices of Oceania are in play in modern politics. The book is so pervasive that many of the terms for propaganda from the book have spread into real life, and in fact the term Orwellian is used to describe settings similar to that of 1984.

This book is still culturally viable, and because it was written in 1948 it uses the common vernacular, meaning it is easier to understand than the sentence I just wrote. A good deal of it is outright exposition, so if you are opposed to that for whatever reason, it may make the book seem sloppily written. If you want a serious and somber look at the potential future of mankind, read this book. If you want a funny book with a happy ending, keep browsing.

The book was fascinating to me, but that may just be the literary nerd talking. I love different worlds, and for me a milieu can make or break a series more than the characters that inhabit it. Borrowing terms from Orson Scott Card, this book is a great example of combining a milieu story with a character story. I was never kicked out of his world by a blaring inconsistency, but the characters were a bit alien. I loved the concept of doublethink, mostly because while seeming so contradictory, it is far more prevalent in real life than we'd like to think. My favorite moment was when Winston is reading "the book" and how it delves unequivocally into how the world works. This section does nothing to advance the plot, but it does help one understand how such a world could come to be. In the end though, the book was worth reading if only because it is the original and best written "Orwellian" book.