Banned Books Week: 1984 by George Orwell

This is yet another one of the top challenged and banned books. I have had it sitting on my shelf for some time and finally took this opportunity to read it. The reasons for the challenges and banning have been widely discussed in the past. I do find it ironic, as so many other do as well, that you would ban a book about censorship. I also find it to be interesting that it has been banned and contested for being both pro-communist and anti-communist, when it actually presents a totalitarian system. While there are some similarities between these governmental systems there are also vast differences.  I will not go into that as I am not a government professor, I will leave that job to the right people.

 

 

Synopsis: "The year 1984 has come and gone, but George Orwell's prophetic, nightmarish vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is timelier than ever. 1984 is still the great modern classic of "negative utopia" -a startlingly original and haunting novel that creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing, from the first sentence to the last four words. 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."

My Review: This is another book I picked up for Banned Book Week, it is a classic that comes highly recommended as well as controversial. As I have said before, I don't read these books searching for the reason for banning them or for the controversy, I simply read them as a novel. I go back and forth on how to rate this one, it was rather captivating for the most part but became a slog to get through in part 2. The massive info dump in that section, especially of information that we had already concluded along with Winston in the previous section was dull. I must say the best and most terrifying part was chapter 5 in the first part. I actually had to write down quotes from the book, which I almost never do. "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words." was a line when they were discussing the Newspeak dictionary and how instead of expanding it they were eliminating words. The other quote that impacted me was "How could you have a slogan like "Freedom is Slavery: when the concept of freedom has been abolished?" that line sums things up rather nicely. All in all it was an interesting read, not one that I would seek out again but one that I am glad I finally took the time to read.

 

My Rating: For me this was an okay book, it read quickly for the first part and then slowed way down in the second and the picked back up in the third part. It has some pretty radical ideas but at the same time the relation to current events is chilling. I give it a rating of Three Paws.