This week's Title Tuesday is 1984 by George Orwell.
Another one of my favorites! Introduced to me by my brother, I first read this at the beginning of high school. Since then, I've read it multiple times and I enjoy it more and more with each reading.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (sometimes written 1984) is a 1949 novel that reflects a dystopia by George Orwell about anoligarchical, collectivist society. Life in the Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, and incessant public mind control. The individual is always subordinated to the state, and it is in part this philosophy which allows the Party to manipulate and control humanity. In the Ministry of Truth, protagonistWinston Smith is a civil servant responsible for perpetuating the Party's propaganda by revising historical records to render the Party omniscient and always correct, yet his meager existence disillusions him to the point of seekingrebellion against Big Brother, eventually leading to his arrest, torture, and reconversion.
As literary political fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four is considered a classic novel of the social science fiction subgenre. Since its publication in 1949, many of its terms and concepts, such as Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime,Newspeak, and Memory hole, have become contemporary vernacular. In addition, the novel popularized the adjectiveOrwellian, which refers to lies, surveillance, or manipulation of the past in the service of a totalitarian agenda.
I'm a big fan of utopian novels, and 1984 does not disappoint! Go pick it up!
Unfortunately, my favorite part of the book is a spoiler alert, so I leave you with another favorite excerpt:
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!" -George Orwell
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