Gather 'round, kids, because it's story time. It all starts with me trying to discover where I can find Cheerwine here in the northern Virginia area. (Cheerwine, for those of you who do not know, is pretty much the most amazing soda in the world. It's like Dr. Pepper, but with more cherry flavor.) So I go to the Google machine and type in "Where can I find Cheerwine?" One of the results is a forum where someone asked, conveniently enough, "Is there anywhere I can get Cheerwine in the Washington, DC area?" I read through the responses, and one of them says, "Just FYI, I was part of a Cheerwine focus group a few months ago... they are indeed looking to make a national push." This is great news!, thinks I. Moreover, the "Cheerwine focus group" part was in clickable-link font. So I click on the link, which transports me to this blog post. Now, I'm trying my best to reserve judgment at this point. When the first thing I see is that gigantic banner/picture, it's hard for me not to start making assumptions. But I check any and all presuppositions and read the post. Sadly, it didn't reveal a massive, nationwide distribution of Cheerwine like I had hoped. But oh well. Time to move on...
Except, not quite. Since I'm a bit curious about just who this person actually is, I click on her profile. I see she has three blogs (!), and that one of them is book-related. Books? I like books. So I decide to check it out. She hasn't updated her book blog in a while, but one of the posts is her review of 1984. Now here's where things get funny/mean (depending on how you look at it). As I read her review, I'm getting a sense of what she's like as a person: not an English major, but likes to read; probably doesn't have children, but I can easily see her as a mother; a calm temperament / not one to swear / probably religious... things of that sort. And I get an idea for a funny humor piece: Stay-at-home moms reviewing classic literature. People like Sarah Palin dissecting Orwell, or Faulkner, or the Brontes, or Joyce, or whomever. But then, before I even have time to draft a copy, she gives me all I need. What follows is my cut-and-paste amalgamation of her review.
I decided it was time for me to plow into George Orwell’s 1984... It was alright... but I won’t read it again. It was interesting to see the perspective of a man writing in the 1950’s predicting 30 years into the future. Jeez, talk about doomsday! 1984 tells us the story of a society where every move you make is monitored by Big Brother and the Thought Police and history is rewritten on a daily basis to conform to Big Brother’s ideology. Pretty spooky. Our antagonist, Winston, decides that he really doesn’t agree with the crap that’s being forced into his mind, and this book tells the tale of Winston’s exploration of defying Big Brother.
Okay. So far, so good. She confuses "protagonist" with "antagonist," but that's forgivable. Here's where I laughed out loud:
I think I would have enjoyed this book a little more if Orwell hadn’t launched into about 20 pages of pseudo-political commentary in the middle of the book. Psh! Who needs that crap! I just wanted to know what happened to Winston!
And then, and here is where I experienced a severe case of cognitive dissonance:
When I finished this book, my first thought was, "Alright, that’s over with." My second thought was, "Jeez, it’s a good thing that’s not REALLY how things are... I think..."
But really, if book reviewers started using words like "Psh!," I'd probably start reading book reviews.
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