You’ve probably seen the memes. Someone gets banned from a social media platform or a new government regulation drops, and suddenly the internet is screaming about "1984." It’s become a shorthand for anything we don't like about modern life. But honestly, most of the people shouting about Big Brother haven't actually sat down with a copy of the books by George Orwell in years. If they did, they’d realize Orwell wasn't just some guy complaining about cameras in the streets. He was a deeply complicated, often grumpy, and brilliantly insightful writer who cared more about the clarity of language than he did about fancy political theories.
He hated "smelly little orthodoxies." That was his phrase.
Orwell, born Eric Blair, didn't start out as a revolutionary. He was a policeman in Burma. He hated it. He saw the "dirty work of Empire" up close and it made him sick to his stomach. When you read his early stuff, you see a man trying to scrub the guilt off his soul. He lived in slums. He washed dishes in Paris. He literally walked into the depths of poverty just to see if he could survive it, and that grit is what makes his writing feel so different from the academic fluff you see today.
The Big Two: 1984 and Animal Farm
It's impossible to talk about books by George Orwell without hitting the heavy hitters first. Animal Farm is usually the one we’re forced to read in middle school. It’s a fable. Pigs, horses, a grumpy donkey. It seems simple until you realize it’s a beat-by-beat takedown of the Russian Revolution.
Old Major is Marx. Snowball is Trotsky. Napoleon is Stalin.
The brilliance of Animal Farm isn't just the allegory; it's the depiction of how language is slowly poisoned. "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." It's a nonsensical sentence. It's a lie. But Orwell shows how, if you repeat a lie enough, and if you control the definitions of words, you can make people believe anything. Even the obvious truth right in front of them.
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Then there’s 1984.
People think it’s a book about technology. It’s not. The "telescreens" are just tools. The real horror of 1984 is the destruction of the internal self. Winston Smith isn't a hero; he's a tired, middle-aged man with a varicose ulcer who just wants to remember if the sky used to be a different color. Orwell wrote this while he was literally dying of tuberculosis on a remote Scottish island called Jura. You can feel that cold, damp, lonely atmosphere in every page. He wasn't predicting the future; he was warning us about the present. He saw how the BBC (where he worked) and the Ministry of Information during WWII handled "truth" and he just turned the volume up to eleven.
The Deep Cuts You Actually Need to Read
If you really want to understand the man, you have to go past the dystopian stuff. Honestly, his non-fiction is better.
Take Down and Out in Paris and London. It’s a memoir of his time living as a tramp. There’s a scene where he’s working as a plongeur (a dishwasher) in a fancy Paris hotel. He describes the filth, the heat, and the sheer absurdity of the class system. It’s visceral. You can smell the stale grease. It teaches you more about economics than a textbook ever could because it’s told from the perspective of the guy at the bottom of the sink.
Then you have The Road to Wigan Pier. This is a weird one. The first half is a brutal, journalistic account of coal miners in Northern England. He describes them crawling through tunnels so small they can’t stand up, their lungs filling with dust. It’s harrowing. But then, in the second half, he pivots and starts yelling at his own political allies. He tells the socialists of his day that they are "cranks" and "fruit-juice drinkers" who are alienating the very working class they claim to represent. It’s hilariously blunt. He was never afraid to bite the hand that fed him if he thought that hand was being dishonest.
Homage to Catalonia is probably his most important book for understanding his politics. He went to Spain to report on the Civil War and ended up joining a militia to fight fascists. He got shot in the neck by a sniper. He almost died. But the real shock for Orwell wasn't the fascists—it was seeing the Communists on his own side start hunting down their allies to consolidate power. He realized that totalitarianism doesn't have a "side." It can come from the left or the right. That realization is what paved the way for everything he wrote later.
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Why Orwell Still Matters in 2026
We live in an era of "alternative facts" and "curated narratives." Orwell would have had a field day with social media algorithms. He understood that the greatest threat to freedom isn't a boot on your face—though he famously used that image—it’s the loss of the ability to think for yourself.
In his essay Politics and the English Language (which you should read immediately), he argues that sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking. If you use clichéd metaphors and "pretentious diction," your brain goes on autopilot. You stop being a person and start being a mouthpiece. This is why his prose is so lean. He didn't want to hide behind big words. He wanted to tell the truth, even when it was ugly.
The Misconceptions
People often think Orwell was a dry, humorless man. He wasn't. He loved gardening. He loved his goat. He wrote essays about how to make a perfect cup of tea and why he liked English cooking (even though everyone else hated it). He was a man of simple tastes who was forced by history to look at the darkest parts of the human soul.
Another big mistake? Thinking he was a conservative. He wasn't. He was a democratic socialist until the day he died. But he was a socialist who hated bullies, and he saw that many people used socialism as an excuse to become bullies. He believed in decency. That’s a word that comes up a lot in his work: "common decency." It sounds quaint now, but to Orwell, it was the only thing standing between us and the abyss.
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How to Actually Read George Orwell
Don't just buy a box set and let it sit on your shelf. Start small.
- Step 1: Read Animal Farm. You can finish it in an afternoon. Don't think about the history; just look at how the rules on the barn wall change.
- Step 2: Read Essays. Find a collection. Look for "A Hanging" or "Shooting an Elephant." These are short, punchy, and will change how you see the world in ten pages.
- Step 3: Tackle 1984, but read it slowly. Pay attention to "Newspeak." Look at how they try to delete words like "bad" and replace them with "ungood." Then look at your phone and see if we're doing the same thing.
- Step 4: Check out Coming Up for Air. It’s his most underrated novel. It’s about a man trying to return to his childhood village only to find it swallowed by industrialism and the looming threat of war. It’s melancholy and beautiful.
Books by George Orwell aren't just artifacts of the Cold War. They are manuals for keeping your head straight when the world goes crazy. He didn't have all the answers—he was a flawed guy with some outdated views on plenty of things—but he had the courage to look at reality without blinking. In a world of "spin," that’s about as radical as it gets.
Actionable Insight:
If you want to apply "Orwellian" thinking to your life today, start with your own speech. Stop using jargon. Stop using the buzzwords you hear on the news. Try to describe your political beliefs or your work goals using only simple words that a ten-year-old would understand. If you can’t do it without falling back on "synergy" or "systemic" or "disruption," you might not actually know what you're talking about. Orwell’s greatest gift to us wasn't a prophecy of a dark future; it was a toolkit for a clearer present.