Books to Read Poster No 42

 I have been giving myself some time off the poster in favour of things Iactually wanted to read but I just finished listening to the next one. 

Here's the picture 

sorry it's out of focus but anyway it was George Orwell's 1984. 

I was reminded by the picture of one of the many odd things about my student trip to Moscow (overall a scarring experience it has to be said although not because of this.)All the rooms in the hotel where we stayed had radios and you couldn't turn them off. You could turn them down until they were largely inaudible but they didn't ever switch completely off. We were told it was because they doubled as listening devices, and I don't know to this day whether or not that was true. I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to listen in to a bunch of 19 year olds talking in a foreign language and mainly moaning about the (lack of edible) food. But who knows? 

It was also one of the most tedious books I've ever read. I said as much on Facebook and got various reactions including someone who told me kindly it was a novel of ideas (really?I'd never have known!) and someone else  who told me it was a satire on Soviet Russia which a) isn't quite true and b) I knew. Neither of these things excuse it from being dull. (Because after all Animal Farm was satire on the Soviets and it isn't dull. It's also mercifully much shorter.) Nor from  having a clunky plot, with a lot of inconsistences, not only at the end but actually all the way through.  Honestly why wasn't Winston  shot? Because that's what we were building up to, that's what the internal logic of the system in the book demands, but no, he's not.I suppose you could say that he might still be rearrested and shot one day, but then wouldn't it be better to show that than have him released and wandering about with an almost happy ending. I suspect Orwell just couldn't face 'killing' him.

I'm sure the book was a sensation when it was first published and probably quite scary and all that, and equally I might have been impressed with it if I'd read it in my teens. But I'm not in my teens now and I certainly wasn't impressed.