Rereading 1984 in My Thirties

I read this the first time in high school, assigned, the way most people probably did, and gave it five stars in my head without thinking too hard about why. Picked it back up this spring because a coworker kept quoting the “who controls the past controls the future” line at me until I gave in. It’s scarier to read as an adult than it ever was as a high school student, is basically the whole review right there.

What got me this time wasn’t the plot, I remembered most of that, it was how physically dense the prose is. Virtually no paragraph breaks for pages at a stretch, sparse punctuation, and you can feel the weight of it in that long stretch where you’re reading Goldstein’s book within the book and your eyes start to slide off the page. I’d read a few pages and put it down, try again the next day, which I don’t remember happening at seventeen. Maybe I skimmed it back then and didn’t know it.

The thing that actually stuck with me on this read is the Newspeak angle, specifically that without the correct words people can’t think the wrong thoughts in the first place, that’s the whole design. I work in a field where precise language matters a lot, you can’t design a part around a vague word, and there’s something quietly terrifying about a system built to make precision itself impossible. That landed harder now than the surveillance stuff did, which is probably backwards from what most people take away from it.

I’ll say the back third works better as ideas than as a novel, Winston and Julia are honestly not that well written or likable next to how vivid the world around them is. But that might be the point. Orwell doesn’t seem interested in whether you like these two, he wants you thinking about the room they end up in.

Four stars, knocked down from the five I’d have given it blindly at seventeen, not because it’s worse but because I finally noticed how hard it’s working to make you uncomfortable, and I don’t think comfort was ever the goal.