George Orwell’s novel 1984 has long been required reading in many high schools, but last month it shot to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list. Why the surge of interest in a 68-year-old book? Some pundits, like Ron Charles of The Washington Post, point to anxieties about the current political climate. He sees parallels between White House adviser Kellyanne Conway’s phrase “alternative facts” and “newspeak”—the language the all-seeing government in 1984 uses to brainwash citizens into accepting lies as truth. Orwell, a British author, originally published his novel in 1949, just as the Soviet Union was becoming a repressive force across Eastern Europe. Penguin USA, the book’s American publisher, recently had to print an extra 500,000 copies to meet the new demand. But Gerry Canavan, an English professor at Marquette University in Wisconsin, says it’s safe to assume that the 63 million people who voted for President Trump aren’t the ones rushing out to get their copy: “I think it’s definitely driven by people on the left’s distrust of Trump. It isn’t people who are happy about recent events that are fueling this increase.”