“There’s more to life than books you know?” (Part Five)

I’ve been debating whether to include this book given the current climate at home and abroad, but it did change the way I looked at literature so it would be wrong not to. At a time when the freedom of the press is being attacked in what I see as a worryingly dystopian way, “Nineteen Eighty-four” still seems pertinent.

I was set this as one of my English A Level texts in around 1982….How excited I was to think that I only had to wait two years to see if it was true! Embarrassingly, I didn’t like it, and dismissed it as awful. Perhaps because of the date of the title, I felt that it was just a really poor prediction. Anyway, enough of my awkward “Wrongness”. I read this again last year when the subject of the media was in the spotlight once more with the ridiculous “Fake News” tag being applied, it seemed, to anything those in power didn’t agree with. Ever the optimist, I felt that this would simply be a phase, and that some form of sanity would return.

Today I sit at my desk reading people attacking the press and the “MSM” for being negative about our Government, and in particular, their arch manipulator in chief Dominic Cummings. I genuinely believe that history will not judge us well for this period. In George Orwell’s masterpiece, the government controls the media and propaganda. In our version, it seems that “The Proles” are being encouraged to dismiss independent reporting as the prefer blind loyalty. Utterly terrifying.

For those of you who don’t know the book, I will not write about the plot. I assume that everyone had heard of it. I will also assume that in selecting this as a To be read” book, that you bear in mind your mental health….Glib though that may seem, it really does ring far too many bells at the moment, and is not to be read lightly.

I think it should be essential reading in every school, as should pretty much everything he wrote. “Politics and the English Language” is another essential.

Do try to read this though, and to question any such tendencies to ape it amongst your friends and associates…It’s what George would have wanted.