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Another classic liberal school read. Seems like "Brave New World" is closer to what's happened but Orwell's fears and warning were well expressed and not to be ignored. Date read is a guess. They do bear a general similarity to each other.

I can't for the life of me figure out how to "do" a re-reading/reviewing of a book in a separate edition. F'ing ŷ������! Anyway, I picked this up at Sherman's Bookstore this afternoon while also picking up "Far from The Madding Crowd." England at two very different times in history. Both speculative I suppose. Not sure when I'll start.

Started last night as GO sets the scene nicely. Airstrip One(great name!) is no place anyone would want to live. So far there seems to be a general similarity to "Brave New World." The point has already been made about how constant warfare leads to political oppression.

Onward into Winston's hideous world as GO gives an increasingly depressing picture of a totalitarian world. Control, control, control is the drug that feeds the shadowy bosses, whoever they are. Do they even exist? Or is this hell-world self-perpetuating? That's a truly scary thought - no escape. No hope.

I wonder about the differences between my current reader-self and my teen-aged reader self. As best as I can remember I found this book to be engrossing when I read it in high school. Now I'm struggling just a bit to find it interesting. It's so hopeless and bleak. Maybe its "newness" to my teen-age self was the dominant element way back then. Maybe I'm a bit jaded(?) these days. Could be also that I have enough depression in my life as it is. This book is MEGA-depressing. Rats eating people faces??????!!!!!

Making slow progress due to life challenges and trying to read 4!!! books at a time. That's a lot, even for me. A big event in the life of Winston has occurred. Much the same thing happened in "Far from the Madding Crowd'" another book I'm re-reading right now.

- This book was taken by some(me, for instance) as some sort of prediction of the future, but it is not that. It is a dystopian fantasy that Orwell intended as a warning. It certainly is that in spades. It also reminds me of the film "Children of Men."

Moving along as Julia and Winston get closer to having a "relationship," which Winston is sure has put him a pathway to death. The sexual content is pretty straightforward and more open than I might have expected or remembered. One might say that this book is composed of Orwell's observations and expectations. Pretty sharp dude!

So... everything was going fine, reading-wise, until O'Brien gives Winston the book, and then I wanted to just quit. And pretty much did. What was an engrossing dystopic novel became a pile of unreadable(to me) Orwellian word sludge. I couldn't even skip-skim it. After Winston finished the book and the obvious plot-things took place I skip-skimmed the rest of it. I guess I don't have the patience any more. The last line is a good one, however, and it's certainly the kind of scenario that can make one think about what's going on today culturally and politically(in the USA) and culturally/politically elsewhere(overseas - China/Russia/Ukraine). What a world!

Much of the social world that Orwell describes is the same as now/then, just more so. The social (connecting with others) challenge, the feeling of being watched.

- suggestions of the Berlin Noir series, The Hunger Games...