Third time reading this one, first time as an actual adult with a mortgage and opinions about surveillance capitalism, and it holds up in ways that surprised me and drags in exactly the one place it always has. Goldstein’s book, the long excerpted political essay Winston reads in part two, is where I lose momentum every single time, it’s necessary for the argument Orwell’s building about how the three superstates actually function, but it reads like homework dropped into the middle of a novel, and I don’t think that’s just a modern-reader patience problem, I felt the same friction at seventeen.

What’s aged better than I expected is the texture of the surveillance itself, less the big obvious telescreen-in-every-room stuff and more the small procedural details, the memory holes, the rewriting of yesterday’s newspaper to match today’s party line. That’s the part that actually unsettles me now, more than it did as a teenager reading this for its shock value. Winston himself I find more frustrating on a third read than I did the first, especially in part three, his passivity stops reading as tragic and starts reading as slightly exasperating, though I recognize that might be the point Orwell’s making about what the process does to a person.

I know Orwell wrote this as a democratic socialist arguing against a specific totalitarian misuse of those ideas, not against the ideas themselves, and it’s worth saying plainly since I still hear people cite this book as an argument against things it was never actually arguing against. The romance with Julia works better than I remembered, small and doomed and human in a book that otherwise runs cold.

Four stars, consistently, across three reads now. It’s not comfort reading and it’s not meant to be, but the parts that land, land harder each time I come back to it.