#6 Greatest Book of All Time

At #6 on the History of Literature's list of 25 Greatest Books of All Time is George Orwell's novel 1984, which was first published on June 8, 1949. Undeniably, it is a compelling and devastating dystopian narrative, and one that persists in its relevance in 2025, as Jacke explains in Episode 757. 

His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.