1984

Added another to my favorites from this list. From the moment I started reading it, I was hooked. But of course, I love stories like this.

If you don't know, it is about a man living in the futuristic dystopian where the Party rules. The citizens are always being watched, and people are persecuted for crimes they didn't commit.. if the party was suspicious of you, you were erased from existence.. past, present, and future.

The over-arching theme I found in this book was the fact that humans, with enough force behind it, can ignore anything and be convinced of anything.. and how terrifying that fact is. Especially with everything that's going on with this Teaparty shit and Obama is a socialist nonsense, it's timely.

Orwell's vision was epic. The idea of Newspeak was brilliant. To systematically narrow language so there is no free thinking is so obvious, but something that is completely out of reach of most minds. I never would have thought of that, though I know very well that our language forms everything around us.

I felt, largely, that this was not about the story. Normally that's not something I would be thrilled about, but Orwell did it brilliantly. He was painting the future--his vision of hell--and not the life of this man. I think if he was trying to write a story and not a snapshot of the future, he would have had Winston overcome the Party's brainwashing. I wish he would have committed suicide when he was released from the Party, but he didn't. He eventually gave in and loved Big Brother. But it's not about Winston--it's about the weakness of the human race, the nightmare our nature holds.

This is why I started this list, to encounter brilliant minds like Orwell's.