Reading: Animal Farm by George Orwell

"Let's face it: Our lives are miserable, laborious, and short." - George Orwell, Animal Farm

Title: Animal Farm

Author: George Orwell

Rating: 5 Stars

This was my first Orwell and I have to say, I gobbled it up. Frankly, I'm surprised that my high school literature teacher never made us read this book. It certainly would have shut us up about her proclivity for finding metaphors where none existed. We often argued with her about her knack for parsing a text until it was like an autopsied body, open on the table and dismembered with no magic left.

But this book was one giant metaphor, and the true beauty of it (and sadness of the world we live in) is that it's still entirely relevant. Orwell may have been commenting on Stalinist Russia, but since then there are still so many other examples we could look to.

This book is a must-read. I genuinely think that it's simple, accessible nature and the harsh truth behind those words are something that every person, especially young people, should experience. It allows you to 1. greater appreciate the ability of fiction to reflec the world around us and 2. to see that history will continue to be an endlessly repeating cycle if we fail to understand it and learn from our own contexts.

5 stars. Can't wait to read 1984.

p.s. I really identified with Benjamin the donkey, what does that say about me?

#book #classic #nerd #recommendation