Rereading 1984 for Book Club and Getting Mad All Over Again

Read this in high school like everyone else, skimmed half of it if I’m honest, and picked it back up years later when it got voted our neighborhood book club’s June selection. Completely different book the second time. As a teenager I mostly remembered the surveillance stuff and Big Brother as a slogan, this time around what actually got under my skin was how much of the control is about thought, not action, the idea that being different from everyone else around you basically counts as insanity on its own.

The parts where you’re stuck reading Goldstein’s manual do genuinely drag, I won’t pretend otherwise, it’s a slog in the middle third and I put the book down for two days right in that stretch. Everything before and after it moves fast though, and the ending hit different as an adult than it did at seventeen, I actually got angry finishing it this time, not at Orwell, just at where the whole thing lands.

Somebody in book club brought up Huxley, and that comparison stuck with me, Brave New World gets you compliant through pleasure and distraction, 1984 gets you compliant through fear, and reading them back to back you start to notice which one our actual world leans toward more. My honest take is Huxley called something Orwell didn’t quite see coming, but 1984 is still the sharper, scarier read of the two.

Someone else in the group pointed out this is basically Cold War propaganda dressed up as literature, and that’s not wrong either, but I think that’s part of why it holds up, it’s specific enough to its moment that the specificity ends up universal. Worth reading again as an adult even if you think you already know it from school.