The Best Book I Read This Month: 1984 by George Orwell

The best book I read this month is a classic: George Orwell’s 1984. I’d read the book in school many decades ago. Given current events—and my discovery of Sandra Newman’s retelling (I can never resist a retelling!—it felt like a good time to revisit it.

Whoo boy! It held up. It was stark and powerful. If anything, it resonated more with me now than it did in my student days. (I was always more of a Brave New World girl.) Orwell’s story and his prose lit up my brain like a pinball machine, so much so that, for the first time in my life, I kept a reading journal.

The similarities between the Party rule in 1984 and what’s happening in the United States right now were glaringly obvious to me: the cult of personality; the surveillance state; the insistence on blind obedience; the manipulation of information; the presentation of lies as truth; the use of threats, intimidation, and violence to force compliance; and the creation of a wealthy, insider elite and a poor “outsider” populace. It’s like the current administration and its adherents are using Orwell’s book not as the warning it was intended to be but rather as a how-to guide.

The three maxims of the Party—War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength—nicely sum up the current administration’s policies. The slogans are not all that different from the administration’s use of “Peace through Strength”*** to describe its bombing of Iran, not to mention the ways that the administration’s education and economic policies promote ignorance and wage slavery.

There are differences, of course. In the United States, race and religion play a far bigger role than they do in Orwell’s vision, where the divisions are primarily class divisions. What we are seeing here is the creation of a Christian nationalist elite (with all the white supremacy that goes with it) alongside an oligarchy of (white male) billionaires. Orwell’s world is very much shaped by Soviet totalitarianism (as seen, for example, in Party members’ use of comrade for each other), and I see what’s happening here in the United States as more closely resembling Nazi totalitarianism. But push comes to shove, totalitarianism is totalitarianism, and 1984 is chilling vision of where we could be headed.

***The slogan dates back farther than this administration. It has been part of the Republican platform since 1980 and can be traced back even farther than that. (I’m looking at you, Barry Goldwater.)

The Best Book I Read This Month: The Lost Village by Camilla Sten

This month, I escaped real-life horrors by reading a horror story set in Sweden. Camilla Sten’s The Lost Village centers on a small mining town in Sweden whose population disappears without explanation.

The story is told in dual timelines. In one timeline, a young woman in the present leads a documentary team into the abandoned village for an investigation. In the other, the young woman’s great-grandmother narrates the events that lead to the disappearance. At times, this structure added to the tension. At times, it gave away information. In reflection, I think I would have preferred the story told in a single timeline (the modern one) and the characters work harder to get the information that the reader needs.

There were some holes in the story, too. Paranormal events early in the story are never given even a hint of explanation. A character lives for years in a town without food—again, without explanation.

Still, I found the story engaging. I did enjoy the paranormal touches and the exploration of groupthink and mental illness. Camilla Sten is an author I would read again.

The Best Book I Read This Month: Agrippina by Emma Southon

I waffled about my choice for the best book I read this month. I couldn’t decide between the science fiction that made me cry (The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal) or the history that ruffled my book club’s feathers (Agrippina by Emma Southon). Ultimately, I chose the latter.

The full title of Southon’s book is Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World. Agrippina was the granddaughter of Rome’s first emperor (Augustus), the sister of an emperor (Caligula), the niece—and wife—of an emperor (Claudius), and the mother of an emperor (Nero). Every member of her immediate family predeceased her. For a time, she ruled the Roman Empire behind the scenes. All of this in a time and place in which women were expected to be invisible—not seen and definitely not heard. The label extraordinary fits.

Southon begins her biography with a historiographical note that won me over very quickly. Southon’s writing has personality. Like other historians of ancient Rome, she addressed the issues of the sources from the time (namely, their unreliability), but she did it with humor. Case in point: she described Suetonius’s writings as an “off-brand badly-cited wiki page.” History with humor? I’m in!

The humor continued through the biography. Southon’s tone had an irreverence to it and an earthiness. My book club was bothered by that. More than one member was bothered by Southon’s use of colorful language and discussion of sex in Rome, calling it vulgar and unnecessary. Clearly, they preferred a more serious approach.

My book club also took issue with the frequency of assumptions and inferences in Southon’s account. I’m not sure they realized or accepted that Southon had to read and work between the lines because of the dearth of sources from the time period. Women were just not written about, unless and until they did something scandalous. That did not bother me, and I appreciated Southon being honest and upfront about when she was assuming or inferring something, as well explaining why she drew the conclusions she did.

As a reader and a history nerd, I found the book enjoyable and satisfying.

The Best Book I Read This Month: How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley

The best book I read this month is the second book that I think is essential for understanding what is happening in the United States right now. (Wild Faith by Talia Lavin is the first.) Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works explains, in plain language, the ten components of fascism. He cites historical examples and explains how each component manipulates the public to ensure support for, or at least a lack of resistance to, the fascist agenda.

Originally written early in Trump’s first administration, the edition I read was updated to include the COVID pandemic. And it’s all there: everything Trump tried to do the first time around and everything that he and his fellow kleptocrats are doing now to destroy American democracy. Stanley provides clear explanations for the methods and purposes of these actions, as well as their precedents in history. It’s chilling.

It’s no coincidence that Stanley and Timothy Snyder, two American experts in fascism, have left the country. (Both have accepted positions at the University of Toronto.) Their work threatens Trump’s power by exposing his goals and methods—and criticizing them in defense of democracy. Push comes to shove, I may delete this review too at some point. The emperor does not like being told he’s not wearing any clothes.

The Best Book I Read This Month: The Light of the Midnight Stars by Rena Rossner

The best book I read this month was an inspiring work of historical fiction. Set in Eastern Europe during the 14th century, Rena Rossner’s The Light of the Midnight Stars is a story of survival, perseverance, and magic.

Hannah, Sarah, and Levana live with their parents near the Hungarian woods. Each daughter has a magical gift, as do their parents. Their family is part of a magical Jewish sect called Solomonars, descendants of King Solomon and inheritors of his magic.

As the story opens, a darkness called the Black Mist is spreading across Eastern Europe and, as is often the case in European history, the Jews are blamed for it. A violent confrontation forces the three young women and their parents to flee into the woods and eventually to Wallachia, supposedly a haven of religious tolerance.

In Wallachia, the sisters deal with the trauma of the antisemitic violence they escaped while also hiding their identities as Jews. They each pursue a different path forward, and as they do, they find their way back to their magical selves. To say more would provide spoilers.

I loved the idea of magical Jewish women. I needed the story of perseverance and survival. At a time when I am exhausted by the world, this book fed my soul.