And also overused. References to his books are just wayyy too common and a lot of the time they don't even make sense, presumably because people haven't read them or they don't remember them, they just see other people making the same comparisons and it kind of becomes a game of broken phone. I didn't know many schools in the UK, US and Australia have his books as requited reading so I guess that explains part of why they are so overused.
Now back to the overrated part. Most people, including me, have only read 2 books, Animal Farm and 1984. That's the books most care about. Animal Farm I never really liked very much. It's not at all creative or artful or anything, it's just an excruciatingly obvious allegory about an oversimplified view of what happened in the USSR. The entire book can be condensed to "the tsars were bad and then Lenin did a revolution and they got rid of them which was good at first but then they started doing some bad things, and after Lenin died Stalin did more badder things and Trotsky was also kinda bad but he was not as bad bad and at least he tried to make things less bad and then Stalin killed him and everything was bad bad bad and it was so bad bad bad bad it was more badder than before". That's literally the entire book. There is no point in reading it beyond that because there is no artful prose, there are no particularly interesting characters, and no creativity. It's just "I'm gonna make an allegory about my limited perspective of the Russian revolution with farm animals". Many act like it is about "authoritarianism" in general and that its scope is broader but it really isn't. It is super specific. It only became popular because it was about the USSR being bad, and also the main message that it ends up passing intentionally or not is "things are bad but if you try to make changes they will get more badder", so it got promoted a bunch during the Cold War. Death of Stalin is genuinely better because even though it is even more inaccurate, it's at least funny and it doesn't pretend like it is anything more serious. It's just "we made a funny parody of Stalinism, the end".
Now, 1984 is a better book. There is at least an attempt at an interesting story and world building, and particularly close to the end it is good at having an emotional impact and evoking a feeling of dread. It's not the oh so insightful criticism of authoritarianism it is made out to be because it is -again- an amalgamation of Orwell's view of Nazi Germany and the USSR (especially the latter), and what he thinks the USSR was going to become (spoiler warning: it didn't). It is completely irrelevant to someone reading it today because it is not how authoritarianism is exercised, and to find something "relevant" you have to squint real hard and bang your head against the wall. People only THINK it is relevant either because they have been told it is, or because they haven't read the book/don't remember it and they imagine what it is saying by the way small excerpts are used in conversation. Pretty much the only society where what he is describing is somewhat relevant is the DPRK I guess but even then like half the stuff in the book are completely inapplicabl.
Nevertheless, I used to think it's an alright book. Then I read the review by Isaac Asimov. I don't agree with every point he makes but it's just so cutting. It makes some excellent points and mentions stuff I didn't even notice when I was reading it or I was just confused by, but totally make sense now. I think my favorite stupid detail was how Orwell was so scared of stuff changing that there was an entire bit about ball point pens (which were new technology at the time) scratch the paper horribly (as opposed to fountain pens lmao) and how people miss how
real fountain pens are. Yeah, ball point pens, such a scourge on society. Who doesn't miss fountain pens?
Here is the review, it's a good read:
http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htmAlso he may have been a rapist which makes the dynamic within the couple in 1984 even weirder in that context.