a book

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Name: Nineteen Eighty-Four
Rating: 5 (15 reviews)
Author: George Orwell
ISBN: 9780451524935

George Orwell · 1993 · 328 pages

Written more than 70 years ago, 1984 was George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, his dystopian vision of a government that will do anything to control the narrative is timelier than ever...

• Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read •

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

Winston Smith toes the Party line, rewriting history to satisfy the demands of the Ministry of Truth. With each lie he writes, Winston grows to hate the Party that seeks power for its own sake and persecutes those who dare to commit thoughtcrimes. But as he starts to think for himself, Winston can’t escape the fact that Big Brother is always watching...

A startling and haunting novel, 1984 creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the novel’s hold on the imaginations of whole generations, or the power of its admonitions—a power that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.

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recommended by 15 people

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Andrej Karpathy
“I went into this book with great expectations since I've heard many references to it, but then found myself slightly disappointed with a thin plot and long sections that read like romance and then horror. Once I got past my initial reaction I realized that I've quite enjoyed the book in retrospect. It reads as a cautionary essay wrapped with a thin plot, attempting to sourly extrapolate societies built on communism/socialism. An interesting point was made that technology helps drive the enforceability of such regimes, which we should clearly be very mindful of. I also liked the idea that language ("Newspeak") shapes thoughts, which is of course quite convenient since language can be simply designed with specific thoughts in mind and then enforced. This makes it possible to manipulate people's thoughts, in case you thought that your own mind is the only definite place of sanctity. Lastly, I enjoyed the completeness and consistency with which the world was developed, even in the presence of on-a-surface insane elements such as "doublethink", or the insistence that 2+2=5, if the party says so. These sound insane, until by the end of the book when you're suddenly not so sure. As a closing remark I thought the book paints a picture that is slightly too much of a caricature. It's relatively easy to consider the party as clearly evil, or that everyone in its plot is basically insane. A more effective approach would present a more nuanced world that looks mostly right and believable, but is still rotten at its foundation with a more subtle form of evil - not black or white but a shade of gray. This would make it easier to draw parallels to a world we live in today, which already unfortunately contains some elements of this book, but is in many other ways of course quite significantly less bleak (phew!). 4/5”↗
Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
“For conspiracists, the persona of investigator gives them a noble purpose. It makes them important. But instead of giants, they think windmills are directed energy weapons. And instead of chivalric fantasy, their literary model is like, the dystopian fiction we had to read in high school: 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, you are here.”
PewDiePie
“I read 1984 by George Orwell before and it's one of my favorite books. It was a book that really left that impact on me and the meaning and the story tied together really gripped me and I think about it a lot.”↗
Chris Williamson
“Such a classic. Didn’t read this until I was 30 and I regretted it. If you haven’t read it yet then you need to. An authoritarian regime is controlling society by manipulating everything. Impossible to read without drawing parallels to the real world which brings the story off the page. A compelling, engaging story which makes you feel sympathetic, uncomfortable, outraged and in awe throughout.”↗
Anthony Burgess
“This is one of the few dystopian or cacotopian visions which have changed our habits of thought. It is possible to say that the ghastly future Orwell foretold has not come about simply because he foretold it: we were warned in time. On the other hand, it is possible to think of this novel as less a prophecy than the comic joining together of two disparate things — an image of England as it was in the immediate post-war era, a land of gloom and shortages, and the bizarrely impossible notion of British intellectuals taking over the government of the country (and, for that matter, the whole of the English-speaking world).”↗
Shepard Fairey
“I read Animal Farm first, but 1984 was an even more intense examination of manipulation and psychological control that made me understand just how necessary it is to push back against restricting freedom of speech and the need to question propaganda. Big Brother has been a theme in a lot of my work, and I even named a show in London ‘Nineteen Eighty Fouria’ based on the seemingly joyful embrace of expanding surveillance in London post-9/11.”↗
Sam Altman
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