1984

1984 gives a distinctive, horror-instilling message of what George Orwell speculated the world was hurtling towards with progressive technology and a lack of power control. And yet we may not have entirely avoided such a catastrophe. What are your thoughts on this subtle, yet deeply scarring, book?

Did you know that Orwell got the title for the book by reversing the last two digits of the year he wrote it? I don't think he wrote it as a warning of something we could avoid, more as a description of what already was.

You use an interesting word in your description: "scarring." What did you find scarring about the book?

Sounds like a homework question to me.

3: Probably, but OP has entered books on the site (unlike many homework trawlers) and I hate to discourage talking about books on the Book Talk group if people really want to discuss them.

So, #1, if you really want to talk about the book, you'll have to say more about what you think first.

At least its a good book to get assigned. There's all kinds of interesting dialogue to get into about the subject matter, in eleventh grade I was pretty excited about that one. Wait'll you gotta do something dry like DH Lawrence ... uh, not that coming up with an essay on Sons and Lovers was a "deeply scarring" experience for me or anything ...

> 5 Heh. For me it was Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I keep thinking that I really should read it again, as an adult, because I'm sure my perspective on it now would be much different than the one I had as a young teenager. But the thought of actually picking that book up and makes me want to run screaming into the night, sobbing out loud and tearing out my own eyeballs.

And yet, a good friend of mine loves that book and counts it among his favorites. To each his own, I guess. :)

OK, my worst memory is My Antonia by Willa Cather my freshman year in high school. I never read anything else by her. I sometimes wonder if I should break the self-imposed ban, then I think back.... {shudder...}

krazy4katz, here's an opportunity to retune your take on Willa Cather. I really want the set but wonder when I would read it.

Robert

"Scarring" as in what Orwell believed was becoming a reality and in the sense that such corruptness was tolerated and considered acceptable in the setting. It seems to me as if Orwell utilized his writing to destroy all possibilities of totalitarianism occurring once more.

Orwell may have created a good message, but because every single generation, especially in Great Britain and the United States, has cried "Big Brother" at every new administration following this book, it's been Godwined to death so much that it's losing it's impact.

Although it's impact has been somewhat dulled by redundancy, those who truly appreciate it (without dedicating an excess of thought) never cease to be impacted. I must say, I do agree that there are copious outcries of "Big Brother" at each turn of power.

9: Wow, when I read it, I thought it was saying that fighting against mechanized totalitarianism from the inside was pretty hopeless. If "they" know your own personal worst nightmares, what chance do you have?

1984 is iconic. It speaks truth to power. it is the lesson we are all trying to learn forever. For me, it is never redundant, never old. Democracies, plutocracies are all at risk. I get the same feeling from it that I get from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

>8 Mr.Durick: OK, now, Robert. I have a kindle, so all of Willa Cather's books are very inexpensive. Which one do you think is her best? Maybe I will try again. I have been thinking of Death Comes to the Archbishop because I like the title.

k4k

I've only sampled her, enough to be sure that I know I want to read her. My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop look surest, but I don't know.

Robert

I love My Antonia, but I'm biased. I taught this book in Junior English for many years. It's subtle and lyrical, and I was always finding something I hadn't noticed before. And, of course, I was born and raised in Nebraska and I love my state - and so did Willa.

I adore Orwell, a candidate for one of the 20th century's greatest writers. I oscillate back and forth between Nineteen Eighty-Four (I believe the title is supposed to be written in words rather than numbers) and Animal Farm as to his finest fictional work - the latter being simultaneously very simple and enormously powerful.

Not many people get beyond these two, but I'd urge everyone to seek out his journalism e.g. The Road to Wigan Pier, Down and Out in Paris and London and essays as well. Penguin Modern Classics publish a good selection, hardcore aficianados like myself prefer the Essays Everyman Classics.

As for those authors scarred for me at school, the prize goes to Miss Jane Austen. I don't envy Mr. Rossotti the job of having to try to get a room of 16 year old boys enthused about Emma, but he didn't do a great job.

14: I liked Shadow on the Rock. Nothing profound or heavy, just people carrying on with their lives in Quebec City.

O Pioneers is a Willa Cather I liked a lot, along with My Antonia.

I can still remember the chilly despair of Orwell's 1984, and it seems timeless to me.

Grammath,

Thank you for the other Orwell recommendations. I will try them!

k4k

I have read both of Orwell's well-known works, but never his less renowned. I suppose I'd better try them.

There's a neat contemporary contrast to 1984, from another famous English stylist with a rather different political background from Orwell's, in Henry Green's Concluding. Green (Yorke) was a Tory businessman in his "day job", and the sinister all-controlling State in his book probably has more to do with Atlee than with Stalin, but it is interesting to see how Orwell's gloomy views about state power were not all that exceptional among writers in late 1940s England. (And don't forget the various British writers who simply packed up and left at that time, like Nevil Shute and Mary Renault.)

Oh, On the Beach by Nevil Shute is one of my favorite books, too. Has anyone here read We by Yevgeny Zamyatin? I have heard that is one of the first of these dystopian novels. I haven't read it yet.

k4k

>23 krazy4katz: I read it - on my son's recommendation.
To me it seems closer to Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four, although the "Big Brother" concept is there.
The work was written in the 1920's and, interestingly enough, although the writer was of Russian extraction, was written while he was working in the North of England. It may have been a response to some of H.G. Wells* ideas (among others): Zamyatin* edited some of Wells' work in Russian prior to writing the book.
Worth a read.

*Gave up on the author touchstone!

ETA: tyop

For Orwell - as far as I remeber, it has been a long tome - I liked Burmese Days. It has one of the vilest characters of all western literature (imho).

Touchstone, I hope, for Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Robert

>26 Mr.Durick: Thanks
I understand that there's a thread somewhere on fixing naughty touchstones. Do you have a link to it perchance?

I don't have a link, but it is simple enough once you've done it. I may tell you too much in the little bit that follows, but it all flows through my fingers when I fix one.

There are work touchstones, and there are author touchstones. There are commonalities, and there are differences.

The place to start is with the directions to the right of the message box. [ is a left bracket. If you bracket correctly and the wrong match comes up in the list on the right, look in that list for the right match. If it is there, click on it. If it is not there, and there is a 'more' to be clicked on, click on 'more' then search the list for the right match and click on it if it is there.

If you fail to find a match, if the match comes up in red, or if you submit the message and the touchstone is not there you can quit (deleting the brackets if you have a false match) or you can go to plan B. There is no plan A because we set out innocently not expecting the cursed touchstones to be a trialfor us.

Plan B is to force a match, to tell LibraryThing the same thing that it tells itself to save a touchstone when you edit a post.

In the case of a title, go to the work page, not the book page, and copy the work number out of the URL. Paste it into your touchstone attempt following the opening bracket, and follow that, before the title, with two colons, no spaces.

In the case of an author, go to the correct author page and copy the author name from the URL. It will typically, but not always, be the author's last name followed without a space by the author's first name. Paste that into your touchstone attempt following the opening brackets, and follow that, before the author name that you have typed, with two colons, no spaces.

If the touchstone doesn't show on the first try now, you can try reopening the message and resubmitting it up to a few times. Sometimes, often enough, that will get the touchstone to work.

That all looks long with multiple contingencies and underplayed caveats, but it took me a few seconds to copy 'Yevgeny Zamyatin' from your post, paste it into an author search (I keep a tab opened to LibraryThing's search page), confirm the result, copy 'zamyatinyevgeny' out of the URL, and paste it following an opening bracket. I typed in two colons and Yevgeny Zamyatin (easier than cut and paste) and a closing bracket. Probably in total less than 30 seconds.

Have fun,

Robert

Amen.

>38 Thanks - it was the two colons trick that I was unaware of (the two colons trick was the one of which I was unaware)(?)
H.G. Wells
ETA: brilliant! 'Tworks! Hurrah!

Ah, the old two colons trick. You pay a lot of money to see that usually.

Cash only. Tell your friends .

Does Willa Cather have anything that isn't about Nebraska and the prairies. I can't bring myself to be interested in anything to do with either, particularly when there are long passages about the grass swaying.

As for the ways 1984 was scarring (as #1 mentioned), I think rats and the hint of a scar on Julia's forehead.

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Robert

Thank you for the recommendation, Robert. And I will rise heroically above the aspersions cast on my home and my pioneer heritage! ;-)

34: Shadow on the Rock is about Quebec City which is hilly and in Canada. I don't remember any grass at all, though there was snow.