Gordaen's Blog

I’ve been using my time on the bus to and from work to read more books. I tried to read Catch-22 but didn’t finish. It was fairly entertaining, but I felt like the satire alone was supposed to drive the entire novel, and it just didn’t work for me. Maybe having been in the military and already having seen much of the same stuff still going on had something to do with it. Anyway, I read Animal Farm by George Orwell after that, and I enjoyed it.

The first thing I noticed about this book was that it is small. It’s about 4.25″ by 7.5″ and less than a half-inch thick; it fit nicely into my cargo pockets. Next, I noticed the author (I’m trying to learn to pay more attention to names because I am terrible with names). The only other book I read by Orwell was 1984, which I enjoyed the first third of and thought the rest was okay. While reading Animal Farm, I could definitely see similarities between the books both in terms of plot and writing style. The plot is essentially that some animals take over a farm and run it in a socialist manner. Eventually, the socialism falls apart. It’s based partly on or inspired by Soviet communism, but I didn’t know enough about Stalin, Trotsky, etc. for it to affect the way I read or interpreted the novel. Like 1984, it did make me think of the previous U.S. presidential administration and the “necessary” erosion of rights.

Animal Farm is a good book and a fast read. It’s also very accessible with fairly simple vocabulary and sentence structure, so most people could read it. Whether most people would get it is another question.

My overall opinion is that it’s worth picking up and reading. You can usually get a copy for only a few dollars (even less if you get a used one), and you can carry it with you, since the book is so small. If you’re one of those people who can’t stand watching movies/reading books where the characters are doing things that they shouldn’t (“No, don’t go in that door!”), you might cringe at the passivity of the characters in this book. Then you’ll probably compare them to humans and mutter a lot. And then you’ll convince a friend to read the book.