Saturday, August 9, 2014

1984 by george orwell

my wife and i read 1984 while we were driving on our vacation.  it was a really fascinating book, albeit sad and disheartening (the end of it anyway).

i simply don't have much to say about it.  more than anything else, reading the book together provided us an opportunity to discuss real-world events going on that indicate we could live in a 1984-like society someday.

we talked about real-life examples of how political and religious leaders will say one thing but in reality they are saying the complete opposite.

the telescreens was prescient; especially in our world today where it is practically de facto known that the NSA spies on every u.s. citizen.  obviously not to the extent of what the telescreens do, but we are not off by far today from something like that happening.

in my opinion, the best dialogue my wife and i had was about how julia and winston viewed their world.  julia simply wanted to enjoy it and really was not motivated to "bring down ingsoc", while winston seemed to have a desire to seek the real truth and rectify the situation.  it is true, a lot of people would gladly remain blind to what governments and some religions to today, while others would attempt to scrounge courage to seek true justice.

anyway - good book, but the dialogue between my wife and i was what i most enjoyed about reading this book.