Most entertaining history lesson I’ve ever had. Had some essays by Orwell after the story itself. Gave up around the middle of a 50 page analysis of Charles dickens

One of the best book I have read.
Animal Farm

Great dramatization of the very heavy idea that "Absolute power is likely to Corrupt Absolutely!"
I have read this book multiple times and would read it again because every time I read I gain new insights into human nature and the civilization/government game.
What’s more, the novel ends with a quote so true that it still gives me chills.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which”.
I also recommend going through - http://study.com/academy/lesson/alleg... to understand the Animal Farm analogies.

1984
I enjoyed my journey throughout the book, it was full of mixed feeling with a common thread of Depression.
The best part of this book is THE GOVERNMENT ! 'he who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past'.

We are all living in 'depression' This book gives new meaning to Depression. Though I know there is a ray of hope somewhere :)

Overall Orwell's fantasy is all too realistic. It fails both as fantasy and prophesy.

Must read books ! Highly recommended to all my reader friends.

3.5 ⭐

Reread 1984 now that it doesn’t seem quite as bad with the doublespeak. Paid particular attention to the way we retain three classes bit. In 2021, we still have quite a bit of work to do on that.

Animal farm is a symbolic remarkable story. 1983 I have read it previously

باكسر از حرف ت جلوتر نرفت. با سم بزرگش روي خاك الف ب پ ت را رسم ميكرد و بعد با گوش خوابيده به حروف خيره ميشد،گاهي كاكلش را تكان ميداد و با تمام نيرو سعي ميكرد حروف بعدي را به خاطر آورد ولي توفيق نمييافت.چند بار ج چ ح خ را هم ياد گرفت ولي هربار كه آنها را بهياد داشت متوجه ميشد كه الف و ب و پ و ت را فراموش كرده است.بالاخره مصمم شد كه به همان چهار حرف اول قناعت كند..... ساير حيوانات مزرعه از حرف الف جلوتر نرفتند و همچنين كاشف به عمل آمد كه حيوانات كودن،مانند گوسفندان،مرغان و اردكها قادر به از بر كردن هفت فرمان نيستند....
قلعه ی حیوانات رو کاش تمام آدمهایی که توی هر جامعه ای زندگی میکنند، بخونند..... این کتاب، از ابتدا تا انتهایش، عجیب از جهل و نادانی می‌نالد...... کتاب سمبلیک جالبی بود...

I just read Animal Farm in this book. It was an interesting story, especially using animals to illustrate political ideas.

No books hit as hard. Not even Metamorphosis by Kafka. The allegorical imagery can require interpretation, but it hits hard even without it. When I read Metamorphosis, the emotion was "despair". Orwell isn't about despair. It's plainly about the death of hope. And nothing hits harder than that.

n  Animal Farmn
Animal Farm and 1984 are contrasted in the foreward to edition, and it's rightly pointed out that Animal Farm was written with more time at hand, but 1984 had to be completed before the end of his life which was nearing. The narrations reflect this reality.

Animal Farm's imagery makes a huge impact on the reader's mind. Each animal is extremely well chosen for the role that they play in the story. The two distinctive feature of Orwell's narration are:

1) It's a factual narration. There is no undue emphasis of painting a canvas for your imagination beyond what it required – utilitarian maximus
2) Repetition infused with crucial differences, leading to increasingly absurd results

The brevity of the book is crucial. The imagery is so powerful and the absurdity so potent that when your hopes are crushed, you won't even have time to lick your wounds. It's like when a doctor distracts you to put an injection, and by the time you realise what's up it's over.

n  1984n
1984 is a book I'd read earlier. The only difference here is that your hope isn't crushed. It is patiently hollowed out so that you're a shell of what you were when you began.

1984 paints a larger universe and has more moving parts. The narration is very fast paced, and the repetition here is of a different kind - it is more systematised than that in Animal Farm. You know how bad it's going to get, so any hope that you have undergoes a deep extraction, unlike being merely dashed as was done in Animal Farm.

1984 is the more popular of Orwell's works, and has gained much significance in India in the recent past. Personally, I picked this up some years ago when a judgment recognising the Right to Privacy came out. "Orwellian" and "Big Brother" kept doing the rounds, so I had to seek out the source to know what it's about.

The beauty of both these works is their continuing relevance. No matter where you are on Earth, if you're a part of a controlled system that either good or gone to the dogs, you'll find here something about why that's the way it is.

1984 is also very often quoted, and I made a reference to it while researching on a speech to be made by a judge I was interning with. My takeaway from the book in the context of "language" is reflected in this line that was spoken:

"Thoughts are not abstract wisps of consciousness, but are in fact conceptualized and grounded in a particular language along with its unique characteristics. ...In a historically multilingual society like in India, where language is so intrinsic to one’s own self of history and identity– the plurality of language is the plurality of thought itself.

George Orwell in his classic 1984 highlighted the significance of language. In his dystopian world, the fictional language “Newspeak” was a controlled language of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary. It was meant to be a vehicle of thought control, meant to limit personal identity, self-expression and free will. For example, the only meaning of the word ‘free’ in Newspeak was to denote the absence of something – this field is free of weeds. Politically, the word was not envisaged to denote free will. Consequently, any such political notion was eliminated from society. Other words that were deliberately omitted from the Newspeak language included justice, science and democracy. Liberty and equality were reduced to a single word – ‘crimethink’ which referred to thought which was considered not in line with the principles of society. This highlighted the political value of controlling language and diversity. "

Animal Farm is about the ushering in of a "revolution" that is hijacked, leading to a new regime which is indistinguishable from the old. 1984 is about thought control through pervasive intrusion of the State. As long as society exists, these works will serve as a warning to whoever's listening.

Animal farm is a good little book. What it lacks in detail it more than makes up for in it's concision and cogency. It would be very comical if it wasn't for how well it seems to align with the actual realities of Stalinism.

1984 is also much better than I was expecting. Far more haunting than Huxley's brave new world imo, and the overwhelming senses of helplessness and disorientation are consistently driven to fever pitch. Orwell's lucid depiction of the exploitable insanity of the human mind, and our dependence on language and historical/ current records for free thought are exceptionally well laid out.

Before reading this, I thought 1984 was about the horrors of mass surveilance and authoritarianism, but these turn out largely just to be background accidental details. It seems to me to be more of an exploration into the susceptibility of the human mind, and mankind in general, especially in our post-religion modernity - and not just in the sense of mind-control, but (at least in my opinion), also in the sense of collective insanity. In 1984, Orwell gradually sets the scene for how it is an uprooted society may plausibly be set on a one-way journey to hell by the will to power. I tend to disagree with the philosophical assumptions necessary for such a dystopia to exist, but without a single clear argument why, I can't shy away from the horrors of Orwell's vicious imagination.

There's a reason this is/ has been required reading for so long. Definite must-read.

Men altså inni søren???

Likte ikke denne like godt som 1984… bare føltes mye mer enkel og mindre flesha ut, også syns jeg ikke karakterene var like gripende… bra den er kort, anbefaler å lese den før 1984, som en liten introduksjon eller noe… kul ide da, minner meg om flukten fra hønsegården (neimen sånn uironisk)

Hei Stian jeg vet at du leser disse mine anmeldelser. Nå har jeg endelig oppdatert goodreads med mine siste lestete bøkene. Hurra! Da er man up to date

Animal Farm: 4/5
1984: 5/5

I enjoyed both novella and novel, but definitely blew through 1984 quicker. I can see why it is considered one of the greatest novels of all time, as it is somehow still relevant even though it was written in the 1940s. The main point I take away from Orwell's book is that you should always learn new things. Always strive to grow as a human being, question things, and trust that you always have room to grow. Otherwise, you are a prisoner of group think and are stuck in your belief system.

I'd never read 1984 before, altho I had read Animal Farm many years ago. Decided in this year of 2025 that the time was now to read this novel about an autocratic society. And in that regard, there is much to say about the book in terms of our current world where "alternative facts" and outright lies and "opinions" about truth have become standard with some citizens--so much so that images of what is a violent coup attempt are called "peaceful protest." I kept ripping off the ends of my bookmark to put in the passages I wanted to remember or come back to.

I will not put all those passages into this review except to note the repetition of the 2 + 2 = 5 idea. This equation is used as an example of the lie that the State can get its citizens to believe--or at least to attest to. Winston says at one point in his secret diary:

"The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true. Hold onto that!
Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth's center. With the
feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom,
he wrote 'Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else
follows.'"

I mention this passage because the edition of the book I read had an interesting and informative introduction to this particular joint publication of Orwell's two works by Christopher Hitchens, British author and journalist, written in 2003. In the introduction, Hitchens provides a brief overview of the publishing and importance of these two most well-known Orwell titles.

Hitchens said 1984 was just an inversion of 1948, the year the book was written, which was of course after WWII and was in the midst of the beginning of the Cold War and rise of the USSR. Hitchens also asserts 1984 came out of
"Orwell's literary knowledge of Russia and of the Soviet Union. The manipulation of numbers
by the authorities (most famously the Party's ability to insist that Two and Two can if
necessary make Five) is anticipated in Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. And Evgeny
Zamyatin's We, an early dystopian fantasy written in the early years of Communism, was
among Orwell's acknowledged inspirations. During the hideous period of Stalin's 'Five Year
Plan,' it was at one point claimed by the authorities that the goal of the plan had been attained
early, in two heroic two-year spurts. This huge lie was sometimes rendered for the stupider
believers as 2 + 2 =5."

Having listed what I learned and my reaction to the book as being too scarily close to today's political situation here, I will go ahead and say, I could not wait for this book to be over once I got past the explanation of the world as it was--the Newspeak, the rationale behind continuous wars as a means to keep people active producing things, etc. The political part stands on its own, but I did not find Winston very sympathetic nor did I find his love affair with Julia very believable. It was too lacking in what seemed true passion, compassion, real emotion. It seems primarily a novel of ideas, and that is not necessarily what provides a binding, emotional response to the book or the characters. My rating is what it is for the novel of ideas part.