Book 1: Animal Farm

Amongst the varied goals of Big, Fun, Scary 2011 is to read more. I feel that a read a reasonable amount, but I could certainly read more. Especially in German. Thus, I have set a rather lofty goal to read 100 books this year. I am only counting something as a book if it has more pages of text than illustration, so manga, comics and other such works will not count. I still expect to read a good number of those.

The first book I'm managed to read cover to cover this year is Animal Farm, by George Orwell. The last time I read this book was in high school, as an assignment. The copy I read is English, borrowed from the local library.

I can say that the main reason I borrowed the book is so that I could finally have something to write about for the reading portion of BFS. The book is short. So short that I read the entire thing in under 90 minutes, including a brief break.

I've found that people either love or hate George Orwell. Most of that has to do with whether they discovered him on their own or were forced to read something of his as part of their schooling. Personally, I find him to be a decent writer, but also a bit heavy handed. His use of metaphor in all of the writings I've read of him come back around to the topics of war, imperialism and the oppression of the idiot masses. These are things I can understand, but don't relate to completely. I suppose that makes the book somewhat less meaningful for me, but I'm not bothered by that fact.

The book is, more or less, as I remember. Brief, with an initially large cast of characters that basically dwindles down to rather few characters in short order. The story loses almost all sense of dialogue during the middle portion, and becomes little more than a retelling of history of an emerging oppressive regime than anything else.

There are clear allegories to real-world politics, and had I been alive at the time when the book was being written, I might be able to place country labels on the various farms and individuals in the book. It holds up to some scrutiny today, which suggests that nothing has really changed in politics.

Overall, a very quick read, and classic Orwell. I prefer 1984 over Animal Farm. Both books cover pretty much the same topic, but from a slightly different viewpoint, and with a more relateable character in 1984.