I thought it was very interesting. The ideas of the telescreens, spy children who turned in their own parents(I pictured them like little girlscout troops), a world where love and emotion was discouraged, and history being rewritten minute by minute, intrigued me.
I didn't see several of the twists in the book coming.
The torture scene with the rats was brilliant. I was left wondering what they tortured Julia with.
I expected to read this and draw a lot of parallels between the society that Orwell describes and our society today. I did do that some, but not as much as I had expected. Here are a few passages that I bookmarked as being noteworthy:
All rulers of all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. -- page 163.
That passage actually reminded me of a news story I saw recently about how the Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch stories were deliberately misconstrued to the public by the military.
From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. -- page 173.
I didn't see that passage as necessarily a governmental parallel (although, I'm sure it applies in some cases), but more of a religious parallel. I am a Christian, and I know a lot of Christians who are content to do things they way "they've always been done" without questioning why things are done that way or whether the traditions they follow are truly Biblical. I've become aware of things that I've always been taught that I just can't find in the Bible anywhere--yet when those things are preached from the pulpit, there are choruses of "amens" all around. We are all too often too complacent, lazy, and/or trusting to investigate truth for ourselves.
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