Read for school in May 1988, a year after Animal Farm.
The surveillance gets the attention and the language is the real subject. Newspeak is an argument that you can make a thought impossible by removing the words for it, and the appendix on it is written in the past tense, which tells you the regime eventually fell without ever saying so.
Reading Fahrenheit 451 nearly forty years later made the contrast obvious. One is a state crushing people. The other is people putting the books down on their own.
