Mad Dogs and Englishmen

I promised myself I'd never read "1984" again at all (except if uni makes me). That book gave me the depression of my life. I don't know how old I was when I read it, but it was the first book I read in English (with a German copy for backup), except for the school crap, so probably about 12. After that I avoided books that were so close to reality like hell and only read soothing things like epic fantasy and sci-fi (the 50s space-battle kind where people really believed they could be attacked by Venusians, mainly, though some of the short-story anthologies I read held some frighteningly distopic stories of the 1984 kind as well). I read "Brave New World" a lot later, though both are said to be the two sides of the same coin, it frightened me a lot less. Maybe either because I was older and had gotten used to such things or, which I rather believe, it is too much like the world we really live in today, so it doesn't hold any terrors anymore. (Which in itself is also a frightening thought: we are living in one of the most disturbing dystopias ever written ...and just like the people in it, we don't even care.)
Oh god, I'm getting depressed again. I shouldn't, because I just finished reading Chetwyind's wonderful Dragonlance parody this afternoon and laughed so much my lungs and stomach are hurting now.