For a stretch my favourite parts of the book were their secret meadow and their room over the shop. As Orwell puts it, "The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal." He rhymes it with the bells song: they eat jam and their neighbour sings what she remembers of the nursery rhyme about now-forbidden fruits 'Oranges and Lemons' and on the wall of the apartment is a massive engraving of the Church of St Clement, a rhyme nobody can finish anymore. So when the Thought Police crash in and smash the glass on the hearthstone, the shattering of the paperweight is forever ingrained in my memory. I felt something in my own chest go with it.

The book almost loses its nerve right there in the middle: I got a little bored while Winston was reading Goldstein's book, and I like how Julia falls asleep while he reads her the book. I skimmed those chapters at seventeen, everyone does. It wasn't until I was re-reading it this time did I see that the wording and dullness of the writing style was deliberate, Orwell being sly, the revolution's holy text a snooze and the girl who actually lives out cold beside it.

I first read this, as many do, in high school, and got the big obvious stuff. I never knew the significance of 2 + 2 = 5 until now. Reading it slow in my forties, what stopped me cold was that little glass world with the coral heart, and Winston himself. The main character, Winston Smith, is an unhappy 39 year old who has an untreated varicose ulcer on his leg, so ordinary it hurts. The rats are what everyone remembers walking out. The paperweight is the piece that broke me. And this book broke my heart, and this one will stay with me for a very long time.