This is so true! Del Toro's love for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is literally palpable throughout the movie!❤️

Rasputin is my Roman Empire.

To whoever thinks classic books are difficult:

They can be. But it generally gets easier with each classic, don't worry.
I jumped from reading Wattpad teen-fiction straight to classics. I didn't know my literary left from my right. Don't know if I do even now. It took me a whole summer break to read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and I thought the 'real', older classics would be impossible to read. But the next classics became much more easier.

Some chunky classics are a struggle still and multiple genres are shoved into Classics just because they're old so if you can't stand one classic, move on to another.

So, why read classics?
-Because they stood the test of time.
-Because they take you to the olden days.
-Because they show you that some human experiences transcend time and endure cultural shifts.
-Because they're gateways into 'The Great Conversation' if not part of it.

Nostalgia is a liar. Because I don't actually miss my childhood. Because for all its disillusionments, growing up is the best thing that ever happened to me. I don't miss the dreary boredom. I don't miss the deep insecurity. I don't miss the constant hunger for attention and love. From parents, from peers, from teachers. I don't miss the fact that every unfavorable thought ended with my family disowning me.

Of course, blissful ignorance permeated most of it. A bliss that was maintained by my care givers. There was also knowledge. I knew that childhood was special even then. And I feared growing up. Turns out, growing up isn't all that bad.

There are golden moments I love looking back at, but I know they belong exactly where they are.

Today is good enough. With all its subverted expectations. With all its defiance. To be cherished. The past with its happiness, with its loss, with its good and bad and ugly, belongs in the past. To be respected though half-remembered.

One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer
The rich get richer and the poor get—children.😁
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Folks, I haven't forgotten the main purpose of this channel, which is to post book reviews. It's just that it feels arrogant to "review" timeless classics and I suspect I'm explaining away the magic with some of them. Besides, my observations are not definitive and my opinions about them change often.

So, treat them less like reviews and more like notes. Even love letters to the books I love.

Having said that, I'll be 'reviewing' 1984 next.

1984 by George Orwell

Be warned that I'm not well equipped to write the sober, magnanimous, scholastic review this book deserves. About how it exposes the very fabrics of totalitarianism and how it seeps into a state. Orwell's sophisticated political and societal insights are stupefying. He writes about a a terrible totalitarian regimes where the party manipulates objective reality by controlling diction, and even the past. It breaks interpersonal relationships in order to instill loyalty to the party as the only virtue. You see indoctrinated individuals tirelessly and zealously work against their own best interests.

Orwell said he only writes to expose dangerous ideologies. However, I think this book transcends that goal as it also navigates the human experience.

Some scenes in this book have moved me to my core. Some have seized me and won't let go. Spoilers ahead.

The first tug to my heart came with Julia's "I love you" note to Winston. The set up was perfectly dreadful that when I read that line I closed the book and wept(among other barbaric things). I was quite embarrassed about my visceral reaction, really.
Their love was sad and born out of desperation. They're an unlikely couple that would never have come together had it not been for suffocating loneliness.

However, the major portion of the book that stayed with me is the last third of the book. Winston's "treatment", at the ministry of love. One mental picture in particular stayed with me so much so that it's what I think of when I hear 1984.

I'm talking about the part where Winston looks at his emaciated, broken body in the mirror. It is branded on my mind's eye. It always reminds me of the fragility of the flesh. And I wonder if O'Brien was right. Is the monstrous figure he saw in the mirror the closest thing he'd been to being human?

I marvelled about how much pain the flesh could take before it gives way to the spirit. About how much terror the mind can endure before you betray the person you love.

And I asked, "Where is the point of no return? How broken do you have to be to no longer be you?

I was also confronted with the thought that we underestimate, sometimes deliberately downplay, the fact that the physical body is vital to our self-image. But we don't like to admit it. Winston looked at himself and quaked at seeing what HE was "reduced" to, not just his body.

O'Brien and Winston's back and forth, especially O'Brien's villainous monologues as he was curing Winston of his heresy...unbelievably good! This tame wolf is so sly that I made the vulnerable discovery that I am the fawning, Stockholm syndrome type. That when everything else fails, I cope by falling in love. So, I hoped Winston would just fall in love with O'Brien, Big Brother, the party and everything that comes with them, just so his pain would stop.

In the end, Winston is defeated, cured of his heresy, repentant and reverent to Big Brother. But that shouldn't break your heart for there is a recurrent message throughout the novel.

And it is this. There is strength in the common people. The proles. The laborers that don't have the luxury to 'think' and philosophize. They are gullible, but poor enough and oppressed enough to see through the bullshit. They are defeated enough to see through he slew of victory slogans.

So even though the party won now, and for the foreseeable future, there is still that hope in the proles. They will revolt one day. And they just might succeed.

😢
"Under the spreading Chestnut tree
I betrayed you and you betrayed me"