deadrok

[deadrok]

WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Beginning to read George Orwell in 2025 (a braindump)

How on earth in the year of our Lord 2025, has a young adult not read any of the many depressing classics that people associate with academia.

It's like it's expected for the well read person to have already taken to the banned book list like a checklist or an urgent to-do. A list of essential steps in the monumental task of personal growth.

Don't get me wrong, some of these books seem like they'd be right up the alley of someone with an analytical mind or even as basic social commentary.

With literature dating back to the earliest mentions of written poetry in Mesopotamia (est. 2500 BCE), literature as a concept has been around so long that even a basic education cannot cover it all.

In the mid-2010s high school literature was designed to teach teens to identify and use themes of multiple sources to prove a statement. The only thing I learned in my one year stint in a literature degree attempt is that a 2k word comparative essay is so much easier when the text is fun to read and full of death.

This year I made a goal to read a novel in a genre I was unfamiliar with. As an adventure power-fantasy and horror enjoy-er, dystopian didn't feel to farfetched to just dip my toes into. What better author to start with than George Orwell?

Disclaimer: 1984 was never banned on a national level in Australia nor the USA. It was only officially banned in the USSR by Joseph Stalin, and the ban was lifted in 1990 after it's collapse.

I'm now progressing through this book at what feels like a rapid pace on par with my teens spent devouring 5 books a week. Material and subject matter aside, I have found Orwell's writing conventions remind me of some of my favourite older novels already and here's why:

Simplified character descriptions

Normalised lack of visual context

I'm enjoying not having everything within the scene fully described to me. Only when the narrative voice focuses on a specific aspect or character do we even get the possibility of a two sentence description. Passing background characters aren't elaborated on past their descriptor or even a paragraph on why the protagonist feels the way they do when they notice this particular character.

There aren't references to architecture styles or a palette for the city past what's is described when the protagonist focuses on their place of work or their mind wonders to landmarks. I think we got a little too used to being spoon-fed the details of the environment that it detracts from the emotion behind the scene or even the character's experience in their story.

Lastly I appreciate Orwell's creation of an authoritarian 'villain'. I have just come off reading The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde where the enemy is the individual's ability to stray from virtue when influenced by another through our friendships. Similarly George Elliot's Eastmarch has a focus on virtues, praising characters on their seemingly religious focuses. This seems to be more common in American provincially-focused classic literature.

As a non-American raised outside of religion, I do appreciate the lack of religious focus in Orwell's novel, even if it was first published in 1949.

All I'm saying is that it's never too late in your reading journey to read a depressing dystopian novel that is also a political commentary.

[deadrok]

[deadrok]

On Reading.

I find as one rekindles their lost hobbies, that said hobbies take way too much effort.

How on earth did I read almost an entire library back in highschool? Using one's eyeballs is really tiresome and hurts after 10 minutes.

Either that or I need to take less shift work.

[deadrok]

One may smile and smile and be a villain.

Booth, Karen Joy Fowler (2022)