George Orwell

[Kupov]

Animal Farm is excellent, but I am not sure it is a must read. Unless you take it as a comment on revolutions en mass rather than specifically Stalinism.

Anyway, your comment reminded me of something that nags me about the book. Is the old pig that dies in the beginning Marx or Lenin?

Has to be Marx.

 

[Heteronym]

He understood the role of language in influencing our thoughts and attitudes, especially political speech.

I believe what he wrote in a famous essay is that political speech was unethical because it contained gross lies, not because it brainwashed people. Any conversation around the office's coffe machine will show people's growing dissatisfaction with politicians comes from seeing right through their bullshit and being powerless to stop them in this age of totalitarian democracy. If language brainwashed them they wouldn't even have the conversation to begin with.

I think the idea that thoughts are dependent on language and not vice versa, is not only an Anglo-American fantasy created by people who can't even speak foreign languages in the first place, but a dated fantasy ever since Chomsky proposed, with good evidence to back him up (something Whorf didn't have when he pretended to know Hopi and invented linguistic relativism out of thin air), that language shares a universal grammar.

Although I love 1984 like few other books, the linguistic aspects of it, out of the Korzybski-Sapir-Whorf school of relativism, diminishes the novel in my view.

 

[Lucifer]

I haven't read '1984' but I did read 'Animal Farm' and much of the scenario described there was actually true( at least historians tell us it was so), especially the propaganda and blaming west even for delayed rains...

 

[chuephödli]

I didn't feel sorry for Alex (...) I think part of what made the book so disturbing for me was how it provoked such strong negative emotions in me, and showed me that hidden right wing streak that wanted public floggings brought back.

Is it right-wing to want someone like Alex drawn and quartered? :whistling:

At least politically incorrect, I suppose. Darn.

 

[the lady]

Down and out in paris and london is one of my personal favourites of his.

 

[scarlettpikachu]

George Orwell is a profound writer!

I'm 15 years old and am currently about half-way through his novel, "1984".

It is one of the most profound books (with the exception of the Bible) that I've ever read!

Down and Out in Paris and London is a very good book, too. My favorite by Orwell (Eric Blair) is probably 1984. It's foreshadowing...

 

[danae]

I read that book before the real 1984 had even arrived.

After reading it, try "Alas, Babylon" by Pat Frank.

now i will read that. I loved 1984. I know that there was a deep political message, but what got me was the breaking down of a human soul. How he just got weaker and weaker. It was heartbreaking.