As much as I hate 1984, I still believe the appendix is the only good part of the book. I guess “language is kind of an effective control tool” is a basic take, but when I read it in high school I was fascinated by how good those few pages were at building the 1984 world.

In my defense, I had never read something like that before (“oh, this is fiction pretending to be non-fiction… is that legal??!1!”) because I was 15 (also I was so creeped out by Winston, the story is better without him)