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Don’t buy George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

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Not if you’d rather read it for free, that is.

I keep reading that it raced to the top of various bestseller lists at the end of January.  (And I can’t imagine why.)  That’s just great, but it’s also available to read for free at various places online.

Here’s one:  Nineteen Eighty-Four.

 

*****

“It was always at night — the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word.

“For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:

“they’ll shoot me i don’t care they’ll shoot me in the back of the neck i don’t care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i don’t care down with big brother ——”

 

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7 thoughts on “Don’t buy George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.””

  1. Thanks for the picture and the post. This is the version I read while visiting my grandfather. It was laying around the house, and I was in high school at the time (Indianapolis Shortridge, where Kurt Vonnegut once attended – excellent English department). I read the whole thing, which for me said a lot back then…

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      1. I agree, the rat scene near the end would have killed the mood. One of his contemporaries called Orwell a “gloomy bird.”

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  2. It has been many years since I last read an Orwell but the appearance of terms like post-truth, alternative facts and fake news prompted me to review the 1984 film adaptation. It holds up remarkably well for a 33 year old film. You are welcome to visit and see how the film stacks up in todays cinematic terms.

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