It was a bright cold day in January, and 1984 was back on the best seller list.
Readers have been buying up George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel in recent days, driving it to number two on Amazon’s best selling books list as of Tuesday night. The spike in popularity seemed to come in the wake of Kellyanne Conway defending Sean Spicer’s falsehoods about Donald Trump’s inauguration crowd size as “alternative facts.” Many on social media compared the phrase to the “NewSpeak” employed in 1984.
This is not the first time the book sales have spiked in response to political events: it enjoyed a stint on best seller lists in 2013 after Edward Snowden leaked NSA documents, when many compared the agency to “Big Brother.”