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A very good book. Instrumental in crystallizing the genre of the future dystopia story. (I'm not 100% certain who founded the genre, but it can't have been Orwell, since I'd say that HG Wells' The Time Machine was also an early foundational work, and that's around sixty or seventy years before 1984, if I recall right.) 1984, in any case, is certainly better than Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, to which it is often compared, probably because they date from around the same period.
To my mind, the best literary exemplar of the genre is Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. A raucously chilling bit of dystopia; if you read it, be sure to get an edition with a glossary in back.
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Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.
(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)
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