I just finished reading Orwell’s 1984. Amazingly, I’d never read it before, despite the fact that I was familiar with many of its concepts. I know that most schools had this book on the “must read” list, but we moved around a lot, and if any of my schools did require the reading of this one, it was in a year level other than the one for which I was there.

Good Lord. No wonder the book is still in print. Talk about a bloody scary book. I had significant nightmares.

It’s a good book, mind you. Well worth reading. It probably SHOULD be required reading in high schools.

But, geez, it really hit on a lot of my personal issues. Issues of being forced to conform. Issues of being watched and controlled. Issues with knowing that something is really wrong with the world around me but being unable to do anything about it. Lots and lots of abuse issues. Small wonder I had nightmares.

Still, if you haven’t read it, I really, really recommend that you do. Yeah, it’s damned scary, but in a grey, insidious way, rather than a “horror genre” sort of way. It’s scary because it’s too close to a lot of things in real life, in my opinion. It’s easy to dismiss a lot of horror genre stories because they could never really happen, or they rely on some sort of supernatural element. Orwell’s 1984 only has to rely on the mechanisms of society and human nature.

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