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2024 reread:
I listened to the new full-cast recording with Andrew Garfield and wow, they did a fantastic job. With the voicing and the sound effects, I really felt the tensions and suspense as it built up. This year I worked with a student on this book, and we ended up having discussions about the different themes, which made me want to reread this. When this production came into my radar, I decided that was a sign I should give it a try. I 100% recommend this recording. It's very easy to follow, with or without reading along, and as I said, the combination of music and voice acting created a powerful production. On one or two instances, the music was enough to make it difficult to easily make out the voices, but overall, it was excellently done. If you have always liked this story, or you have never read it but always meant to, give this production a try!

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4.5 stars

I don't think I've ever read this, although I have definitely heard about it and had some idea of what it was about. If I recall correctly, some of my classmates read 1984 and some of us read Brave New World. I was in the latter category. I seem to recall that it was rather depressing and I wasn't so sure that I liked it. I would have to reread Brave New World now to make a direct comparison. What I can say now is that I've read a number of dystopian stories in the past couple of years, including Neal Shusterman's Arc of a Scythe trilogy and Lois Lowry's Giver Quartet and I don't think this book stands out that much, until I realize that it was written in 1949. While I know he was not the first to craft a dystopian society in a novel, I thought he did an amazing job imagining what it might be like to live in a society like that and Simon Prebble was so perfect as the narrator there were times I got chills over what was going on. I did laugh when they mentioned Saccharine since it was the sugar substitute of choice when I was growing up--I thought it was invented about that time. So yes, I had to look it up and found it was accidentally discovered in 1878/9. When they talked about the language and the thought police and media trying to change what you thought you knew, I totally thought of the past four years and how certain news agencies have fed the public all sorts of misinformation deliberately to change the minds of the citizens. It was eerily on target. I was just entering high school in 1984 and we would have read this book and possibly scoffed at such a possibility, but seriously, this sort of stuff is still going on. Anyway, I highly recommend both the book and the audio.