I managed to read the book blind, without any spoilers. And I liked it. I won't say it was an enjoyable read, because it wasn't, but that's to be expected of the genre.
To cover the two minor quibbles I have first: the pacing. The plot just seemed to drag on and on until suddenly everything happened at once, and at the end of the book I was left checking if I had somehow missed several chapters or so. I don't mean the essay in the middle of the book. I mean that the first two-thirds of it just seem to be nothing but description of the world, interspersed with Winston and Julia's affair. Which was a little disappointing, because while world-building is fine, there wasn't exactly a huge world to build. It's a poverty-stricken dystopia where everyone is watched by the Party. Everything else is just details. I'd much rather have read about how the Inner Party works, or the lives of the supposedly free proles, but we don't see it apart from vague observations by Winston.
The second quibble is that it's a hard book to finish. It gives me no reason to finish. It becomes quite clear pretty early on that Winston and Julia are not going to succeed in their rebellion, and since that's the force driving the plot, why continue?
The major problem I have with the book is that I couldn't understand what its message was. I mean, I understand that totalitarianism is bad in all forms, but that's hardly a message I needed to be told. I asked a few people and I tended to get one main answer, and it's very unsatisfying to me.
Most people said that Orwell wanted us to recognize the signs of totalitarianism when we saw them. Except that he doesn't tell us what those signs are. The book is irritatingly vague on the origins of the Party. I get that the vagueness is supposed to be part of the "this could happen anywhere, under any philosophy" idea, but if he really wanted us to know when Big Brother was coming, he could at least tell us what his car looks like. I already understand that government control tends to be a slippery slope. I didn't need a depressing Shaggy Dog Story to tell me it again. So I'm left slightly confused as to exactly what, if anything, Orwell wanted us to know. I certainly learnt a lot about how to run a dictatorship, but not how to stop it, and Orwell seems to claim it can't be stopped. What did I miss?
I liked it, but something was missing.
I managed to read the book blind, without any spoilers. And I liked it. I won't say it was an enjoyable read, because it wasn't, but that's to be expected of the genre.
To cover the two minor quibbles I have first: the pacing. The plot just seemed to drag on and on until suddenly everything happened at once, and at the end of the book I was left checking if I had somehow missed several chapters or so. I don't mean the essay in the middle of the book. I mean that the first two-thirds of it just seem to be nothing but description of the world, interspersed with Winston and Julia's affair. Which was a little disappointing, because while world-building is fine, there wasn't exactly a huge world to build. It's a poverty-stricken dystopia where everyone is watched by the Party. Everything else is just details. I'd much rather have read about how the Inner Party works, or the lives of the supposedly free proles, but we don't see it apart from vague observations by Winston.
The second quibble is that it's a hard book to finish. It gives me no reason to finish. It becomes quite clear pretty early on that Winston and Julia are not going to succeed in their rebellion, and since that's the force driving the plot, why continue?
The major problem I have with the book is that I couldn't understand what its message was. I mean, I understand that totalitarianism is bad in all forms, but that's hardly a message I needed to be told. I asked a few people and I tended to get one main answer, and it's very unsatisfying to me.
Most people said that Orwell wanted us to recognize the signs of totalitarianism when we saw them. Except that he doesn't tell us what those signs are. The book is irritatingly vague on the origins of the Party. I get that the vagueness is supposed to be part of the "this could happen anywhere, under any philosophy" idea, but if he really wanted us to know when Big Brother was coming, he could at least tell us what his car looks like. I already understand that government control tends to be a slippery slope. I didn't need a depressing Shaggy Dog Story to tell me it again. So I'm left slightly confused as to exactly what, if anything, Orwell wanted us to know. I certainly learnt a lot about how to run a dictatorship, but not how to stop it, and Orwell seems to claim it can't be stopped. What did I miss?