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. Different experience entirely at thirty-four.

What got me this time wasn’t the plot, I remembered most of that, it was how physically dense the prose is. No paragraph breaks for pages at a stretch, sparse punctuation, that long stretch where you’re reading Goldstein’s book within the book and your eyes start to slide off the page. I actually put it down for two days in the middle of that section, 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 the idea that shrinking the vocabulary shrinks what you’re able to think in the first place. 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 never fully became people to me the way the world around them did. 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.