1984
In my opinion, George Orwell's 1984 is incredibly overrated. Yes, there are some interesting political ideas. Yes, it's important to read this book and be on guard against a society like the one portrayed happening. Yes, we still refer back to this book constantly when we talk about things like Big Borther, Newspeak, and Double Think. But the characters are boring and hard to sympathize with and the plot is barely there. Seriously, thirty pages of this book was devoted to Goldstein's analysis of Oceana. As dry as it was, it was probably the point of the entire book. There were a couple of things that stood out as interesting. One was the presentation of Big Brother and Goldstein, which set them up in a God/Satan dynamic. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counterrevolutio...