2008 books
“...practices which had long been abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years - imprisonment without trial, the use of torture to extract confessions... - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.”
2) George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949 (RE-READ)
When reading Nineteen Eighty-Four as a teenager in the late 1970s I interpreted it (perhaps naïvely) as a useful piece of socialist political science fiction and little more, a somewhat far-fetched thought experiment though clearly a proverbial canary in the coal mine for the British political intelligentsia. Instead the intervening years seem to have brought us considerably closer to too many aspects of Orwell's vision, particularly with respect to surveillance in the UK and the conduct of political hypocrisies on a global scale. As a warning Nineteen Eighty-Four continues to serve the Western world very well indeed, and one wishes Russian and Chinese literature could have come up with equally potent fables of their own that would have had a similarly enlightening effect on their own populations and a restraining effect on their leaders. The intervening sixty years since it was written have often resonated with sentences and passages from this book that could be read as historical fact in parts of the world - the excesses of Russian and Chinese communism particularly, the former which Orwell feared English Socialism had a real danger of resembling - or echoes of the world's present nervous condition, in which realities are habitually fabricated for entire populations in a way that would horrify our ancestors. Necessarily (and thankfully) extreme, it has inevitably become one of the defining books of the twentieth century, and with the invention of Newspeak has also made a useful and indelible stamp on the English language and conceptual thought everywhere. Doubleplusgood.