Everyone Loved 1984. I Don't Believe Them.
Every so often 1984 comes up. Sometimes I’m the one who brings it up, and honestly, when I do, it’s because I’m hoping to find one person who’ll agree with me that it’s a terrible book.
It never happens. Instead someone tells me how much they loved it. And unless they’re one of the genuinely intense, reads-political-theory-for-fun people I know, I’m pretty sure they’re full of shit. They didn’t love it. Most of them didn’t read it.
Here’s the confession that makes this whole thing funny: I never finished it either.
Where I stopped
I got about three-quarters of the way through. Then Winston opens up Goldstein’s book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, and Orwell just… prints it. Page after page of a fake political treatise dropped into the middle of a novel. Dense as hell. No story, no characters, just theory.
I didn’t skip ahead. I stopped. I never read that section, and I never read anything after it.
And it’s not just me. While Winston reads it out loud, Julia falls asleep. The book’s own heroine checks out during that part. Even Orwell knew.
The ideas are good. The book is dry.
I want to be fair here. The concepts in 1984 are interesting, and a lot of them are true. Doublethink, the memory hole, rewriting the record, Newspeak shrinking what you’re even able to say. Orwell called a lot of shit, and we’re living in some of it.
But a great idea and a great read aren’t the same thing. 1984 is fucking dry. And it’s not that I hate dystopias. I actually enjoyed Brave New World, the one where everybody takes soma to feel better and the guy who doesn’t fit in ends up hanging himself. Same genre, same dark ending, and I liked it. 1984 just felt like homework.
Why would anyone lie about this?
When someone gushed about 1984, I’d admit that I found it dry and boring and couldn’t get through the Goldstein part. I tried to keep it light and charming, but in hindsight, telling someone you couldn’t finish the book they just raved about kind of implies they didn’t either. Nobody ever walked away from that conversation feeling closer to me.
So why fake it? I don’t think most of them are lying the way I used to assume. I think it’s more like this:
- They’re mixing up the ideas with the book. Big Brother, thoughtcrime, “Orwellian” are everywhere. You can absorb all of it without reading a page. When someone says “great book,” what they usually mean is “great ideas,” and I agree with that part.
- Praising a classic is safe. Saying a canon book bored you feels like admitting you’re not smart enough for it. Saying you loved it costs nothing.
- It’s a team jersey. Left and right both use “Orwellian” as a weapon. Saying you love 1984 says “I see what the other side is up to.”
- School memory. A book you got assigned at fifteen and half-remember can turn into a book you “loved.”
Which is probably why my honesty never helped. To me, I was just being honest about a book. To them, it might have sounded like I was calling them a fraud.
What I’d do now
Instead of confessing how bored I was, I’d just ask one question:
“What’d you make of Goldstein’s book?”
- Someone who actually read it will have a reaction, even if it’s just “God, that part.”
- Someone who skimmed will tell you they skimmed it.
- Someone who never read it won’t know what you’re talking about.
Same information, no awkwardness. And if they light up about it, then great, I’ve found somebody who made it further than I did, and I’d actually like to hear what I missed.
It’s Banned Books Week, so read something people have tried to keep from you. Just be honest about how far you got.
Drafting assistance for this piece was provided by Claude (Anthropic). The opinions and the unfinished copy of 1984 are my own.