AUGUST 2026 READING
1984
by George Orwell
published 1949, Secker & Warburg
380 pp,
ISBN 978-0451524935
Book Club Meeting:
August 25, 2026, 7:00 pm
Hosted by: Beth Kanalley
Snack provided by: Beth Kanalley
Wine provided by: Patti Finnerty
Book selected by: Cathy Enz
Accessibility
Print
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Finger Lakes Library System
Large Print
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Finger Lakes Library System
E-book
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Finger Lakes Library System
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NY Public Library
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Amazon (Kindle)
E-audio book
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Finger Lakes Library System
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Amazon (Audible)
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NY Public Library
About the Author: George Orwell
"Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (both authoritarian communism and fascism), and support of democratic socialism.
Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism.
His non-fiction works, including 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in industrial Northern England, and 'Homage to Catalonia' (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.
Orwell's work remains influential in both popular and political culture, with the adjective 'Orwellian' (describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices) becoming part of the English language, as are many of his neologisms, such as 'Big Brother'.
In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945."
Additional Resources
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Wikipedia on Nineteen Eighty-Four
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Iowa State Daily indepent student newspaper Book Review
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Audible Audio Book Review George Orwell's 1984
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The Guardian review "Nothing but the truth: the legacy of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four"
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The Reader's Room "Terrible reviews of great books: Orwell's 1984"
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WBUR On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti "'1984' In 2019: Did George Orwell's classic get it right?"
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Roger Ebert book review of the novel and movie
1984
Kirkus Reviews
"Certain to create interest, comment, and consideration."
"The Book-of-the-Month Club dual selection, with John Gunther's Behind the Curtain (1949), for July, this projects life under perfected state controls.
It presages with no uncertainty the horrors and sterility, the policing of every thought, action and word, the extinction of truth and history, the condensation of speech and writing, the utter subjection of every member of the Party.
The story concerns itself with Winston, a worker in the Records Department, who is tormented by tenuous memories, who is unable to identify himself wholly with Big Brother and The Party. It follows his love for Julia, who also outwardly conforms, inwardly rebels, his hopefulness in joining the Brotherhood, a secret organization reported to be sabotaging The Party, his faith in O'Brien, as a fellow disbeliever, his trust in the proles (the cockney element not under the organization) as the basis for an overall uprising.
But The Party is omniscient, and it is O'Brien who puts him through the torture to cleanse him of all traitorous opinions, a terrible, terrifying torture whose climax, keyed to Winston's most secret nightmare, forces him to betray even Julia. He emerges, broken, beaten, a drivelling member of The Party.
Composed, logically derived, this grim forecasting blueprints the means and methods of mass control, the techniques of maintaining power, the fundamentals of political duplicity, and offers as arousing a picture as the author's previous Animal Farm.
Certain to create interest, comment, and consideration."
Writing 1984
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"In May 1946 Orwell arrived on the Scottish island of Jura. He had wanted to retreat to a Hebridean island for several years; David Astor recommended he should stay at Barnhill, a remote farmhouse on the island that his family owned, with no electricity or hot water. Here Orwell intermittently drafted and finished Nineteen Eighty-Four.
His first stay lasted till October 1946, and during it he made little progress on the few already completed pages, and for a period of three months he did not work on it at all. After spending the winter in London, Orwell returned to Jura; in May 1947 he reported to Warburg that despite progress being slow and difficult, he was roughly a third of the way through.
He sent his 'ghastly mess' of a first-draft manuscript to London, where Miranda Christen volunteered to type a clean version. Orwell's health worsened further in September, and he was confined to his bed with inflammation of the lungs. He lost almost two stone (28 pounds or 12.7 kg) in weight and had recurring night sweats, but he decided not to see a doctor and continued writing.
On 7 November 1947 he completed the first draft in bed, and subsequently travelled to East Kilbride near Glasgow for medical treatment at Hairmyres Hospital, where a specialist confirmed a chronic and infectious case of tuberculosis.
Shortly before completion of the second draft, Orwell vacillated between two titles: 'The Last Man in Europe', an early title, and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'. Warburg suggested the latter, which he took to be a more commercially viable choice.
There has been a theory – doubted by Dorian Lynskey (author of a 2019 book about Nineteen Eighty-Four) – that 1984 was chosen simply as an inversion of the year 1948, the year in which it was being completed. Lynskey says the idea was 'first suggested by Orwell's US publisher', and it was also mentioned by Christopher Hitchens in his introduction to the 2003 edition of Animal Farm and 1984, which also notes that the date was meant to give 'an immediacy and urgency to the menace of totalitarian rule'. However, Lynskey does not believe the inversion theory."
DRYDEN BOOK CLUB
est. 2001