h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

After thinking hard about my 'favourite book' I've come to the conclusion that it must be George Orwell's novel Nighteen Eighty-Four.
So why? It is a book that warns, and as the poet, Owen I think during WWI, said, "all the poet can do is warn". The same applies to the novelist.
The title 1984 was not Orwell's original idea, he wanted 2025 or some such date, but he picked on 1984 because he thought it would sell more books than 2025 or whatever the original title was going to be. The problem with the title highlights the importance of the book, because it's to do with the deceptive language of politicians, businessmen and warmongers - 'spin' we call it today. There are no more slaughterings and butcherings only friendly fire and collateral damage and so on, unless it applies to the other side.
Orwell saw the political need for the world to be kept in more or less a state of permanent alarm and crisis and this is the main theme of 1984 where 3 super-powers 'battle for supremacy' but in reality 'battle for control over their own citizens' through fear and misinformation. The alarm code, red or orange is never allowed to go to green. People must always be kept in various stages of being 'on edge'.
And so I read it at least once every year or so in order that I don't become an unthinking automaton, following blindly the path that others may like to set out for me wherever it may lead. It's an anecdote for the brainwashed, be it political, military, industrial, religious or whatever else the gullible citizen may be prone to.
1984 is my insurance policy against being a carrier of dumkopfness and therefore is my favourite book in the sense that it's my most important book. The 9/11 incident and what followed, and is following, brings into sharp focus the importance of this novel, written up there on windswept rainy Jura in the Hebrides in a small remote cottage by a sick man coughing up his lungs; 1984 - his final and most courageous and important act.