1984
I finally finished 1984 the other day, cover-to-cover. I’d “read” it in eleventh grade but in the end it’s all the better to have completed it for the first time now. I think I’m better equipped to understand what Orwell was getting at, and sadly the timing couldn’t have worked out more seamlessly. In its time, I’d say the novel was a reductio ad absurdum portent of doom, a cautionary tale, that also obliquely addressed the totalitarian governments in Europe that were in various stages of flourish in the late 1940s. But in present-day America, the book nearly ceases to have its satirical undertones because it approaches fundamental reality, with its increasingly oppressive and invasive state scaring people into thinking a certain way, making them afraid to be human, and claiming malleable lies as infallible truth.
