Brilliant, but a good part of it somewhat dull. Orwell was a brilliant essayist, and it shows. 
 This novel-essay had its up and downs: in the beginning hard to get into because not much was happening; then it picked up when he met Julia and read 'the book,' until he went you-know-where. After that, Orwell went into essay mode again and it read like a philosophy book (which was the point), but as a reader you simply wanted it to end. Until it did. 
 But then it didn't because we were given an explanation of Newspeak... a long explanation. 
 What I can say though is that the biggest strength in this essay-novel is Orwell's accurate portrayal of a future under a totalitarian regime... we could even apply it to governments which are not supposedly totalitarian (Trump's USA, I'm looking at you), and one could definitely see the media's twisting of information to fit the current political agenda. This in itself was probably the most shocking aspect of the book, besides the whole changing the language to model one's thoughts, of course, since we live it, but we don't really SEE it. The masses are being kept deliberately ignorant, and we allow it. 
 We are the proles.