Told you that missing week was just an aberration - everything's back to normal with another recommendation this week.

Not too much else to write about this week, but remember if you want to review or recommend a book you've read then please contact me and I'll add your review/recommendation to the 'Reader Recommendations' section up above here. It's looking a bit bare at the moment, and I do want to hear your views.

Oh, and a quick apology in advance if the punctuation of this issue goes a bit awry at times. The comma key on my computer's keyboard is starting to die on me, so sometimes one doesn't appear when it should. No idea why that key should choose to go before any of the others, but that's life I guess. Of course, any non-comma related spelling grammar and punctuation errors have no excuses.

Let's get on with this week's recommendation:

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of those books that everyone thinks they know, even if they haven't actually read it. After all, so many phrases from it have entered the English language - Big Brother, Room 101 and The Ministry of Truth, for example - that everyone is sure they know what the book is about.

In my opinion, the problem comes because if we haven't actually lived in one of the totalitarian states that Orwell portrays, we feel that we know what sort of society he's depicting and miss the subtler implications of tyranny portrayed in the book. Instead we concentrate on the surface depictions of what we like to think of as a 'Big Brother' society - surveillance cameras monitoring us at all times and the secret police always ready to get us if we show any signs of resistance. Even now, over fifty years after Orwell wrote it, his depiction of life in Airstrip One remains vivid, the bleakness of the society standing out against Winston and Julia's attempts to find some happiness and freedom and the crushing nature of the Party's rule is one of the classic depictions of totalitarian society in English.

(Quick trivia interjection: The title of Nineteen Eighty-Four comes from Orwell's reversal of the last two digits in the year he wrote it - 1948. Whether he regarded it as an actual depiction of life thirty-six years in the future is one of those debates that have run for years)

The part of Nineteen Eighty-Four that I think is the most important, especially in the world today, is how Orwell deals with the ideology of the Party and how it seeks to not just rule the physical world of its people but also their minds making resistance not just impractical but impossible to even contemplate. The plot is not just about how the Party stop Winston and Julia from rebelling physically against them, but how it breaks their will to resist and turns them back into unquestioning drones returning them to a state where they 'love' Big Brother and accept that the Party is always right. For me, this is the most terrifying part of the book - all of us can accept that the overwhelming force and power of a totalitarian society could stop a rebellion by two people, but the Ministry of Love is about more than that and in showing the power of a state to warp the minds of its citizens it sends out a message that's as important to us today as it was after World War Two. In demonstrating the Party's power to make two plus two equal five he shows that even what we believe to be incontrovertibly true can be subverted by the power of the state. Its only a small step from this to 'victory over yourself' and accepting the overall ethos of the Party - War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. Any resemblance to the Republican Party is purely coincidental, of course.

That's the section of Nineteen Eighty-Four that sends out the biggest warning to us in the present day faced with daily propaganda that certain things are true, and have to be true, because Authority (whoever that may be) has decided them to be true. We're not quite in same position as Winston Smith, whose entire language was being replaced by Newspeak which would 'make all other modes of thought impossible', but we are in a world where the media can define what a word means, even if that's diametrically opposed to what the world has always meant. Witness the demonisation of 'liberal' in the US over the past twenty years, for example. Our perception of the world around us gets manipulated by the dominant ideology which can even condition our view of the past to make itself seem even more correct and irreplaceable. 'Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past.'

I don't deny that this gives Nineteen Eighty-Four a certain bleakness, but it would have been almost impossible for Orwell to not make it bleak and remain true to the message he wanted to deliver. The plot of the book has inverted morality totally and the ending is a perfect example of Robert Mckee's idea of the 'negation of the negation' - it's not just that Winston's rebellion has been beaten and his spirit broken, but that he has come to love those who broke him and feel joy in his own mental destruction. For the reader, the ending is one of existential terror, enhanced rather than mollified by the joyous feelings of Winston.

Even though I'm sure most of you will have already read Nineteen Eighty-Four I'm recommending it because I think it's a book that everyone should read, even without a Party to force them to read it and even if you have read it, its a book that can be reread time and time again, each time giving you new insights into it. If you've never read it, what are you waiting for?

As a quick addition to the recommendation of the book, if you ever get the chance to see the BBC TV version of it from the 1950s (with Peter Cushing as Winston) then watch it. It's a fascinating adaptation of the book, and Cushing's performance makes you believe in its potential reality. And Cushing's performance is incredible.

Hmmm...that's got me thinking about who'd be good in a modern film version of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ian McKellen as O'Brien and Kevin Spacey as Winston? Would be interesting, but if you've got your own views then please let me know.

OK, that's it for another week. Next week, we'll have a change of pace and a nice slow journey down the Mississippi...