1984

"1984" is a book by George Orwell. It was a book that I had been meaning to read for years, but I never had the time. From a post I did last month, I said that I'm going to try to read 56 books this year from several different categories. So, for the classics category, "1984" was one of the books I chose.

Many of you have probably read this book. Maybe it was assigned reading in high school or college. I liked the book a lot. I like what it had to say about how many times we believe things without question because the media or the government say things. Sometimes we feel that people are wanting us conform to a certain mold. This was a good book about trying to find truth and not necessarily believing things because the media or government tell you a certain fact.

Unfortunately, I see this happen a lot of times in Christianity. Sometimes, Christians will bend truth (alright...sometimes they lie) about certain facts to get people to behave in a certain way. When I was a teen-ager, Marilyn Manson was just beginning to get real popular. I remember hearing all of these things about him from my church and my mom (who heard it on Christian radio). Some of them were true. But a lot of them were made up in an attempt to scare people away from listening to him or going to his concerts.

Whether I agree with Marilyn Manson or not, we don't need to lie in order to get people to behave in a way that we think is right. In this book, it shows what attempts people could go to in order to make people conform to their beliefs, or philosophy, or whatever. If you haven't read this book, I would suggest it.

The only thing I didn't like about the book were the characters. There was one main character who's eyes we see the story through. But I didn't feel much for him, or for any of the characters for that matter. There wasn't very much character development (which usually I like in a story). But the story and the meaning the author was trying to get through was good.