Rereading 1984 On My Lunch Break Was A Mistake

Read this in high school like everyone did, remembered almost none of it except the rats, went back this year because a friend kept quoting the 2+2=5 line at me until I gave in. Reading it as an adult who has to sit in an office is a completely different experience than reading it as a kid who has to sit in a classroom. There’s a passage about the constant low-grade surveillance of Party members and I kept thinking about the little green dot that shows up next to your name on Slack when you’re active, which is not what Orwell meant but is exactly what it felt like.

Somebody in the reviews said every time Winston’s name comes up they think of Winston Churchill instead, and now I can’t unsee that either, it’s a weird little glitch that follows you through the whole book once it’s pointed out. The Goldstein treatise in the middle, the long fake-book-within-the-book section, is the part people argue about, one reviewer called it a scar that disfigures the structure of the whole novel, and honestly I get it, it stops the plot cold for a stretch. I didn’t mind it as much this time. Doublethink is the concept that’s aged the worst into being the most useful, holding two contradictory beliefs and being fine with both, I see it constantly now and not just in politics.

The ending gutted me both times, but differently. At sixteen it was just bleak. At thirty-something it felt closer to a warning I’d already half ignored. Somebody said it gave them actual nightmares as an adult in a way it never did as a teenager, and yeah, same. Five stars, and I’m annoyed it’s still this relevant.