Review: Animal Farm

Genre: Dystopian animal fable
Title: Animal Farm
Author: George Orwell
Rating: 2.7/3

Plotline (from Goodreads):
Animal Farm is the most famous by far of all twentieth-century political allegories. Its account of a group of barnyard animals who revolt against their vicious human master, only to submit to a tyranny erected by their own kind, can fairly be said to have become a universal drama. Orwell is one of the very few modern satirists comparable to Jonathan Swift in power, artistry, and moral authority; in animal farm his spare prose and the logic of his dark comedy brilliantly highlight his stark message.

My take:

I enjoyed this book. Really, I did.
...

Why does no one believe me? Is it because so far on this blog I've only given bad ratings to classic novels and justified myself by saying it's my opinion?

... Okay if I put it that way I can kind of understand why no one believes me.

But seriously, I enjoyed the book! I don't know if it was for some glorious literary reason such as the symbols hooked me and I identified myself as a freedom-greedy beast, or some simple reason such as the fact that the book was on the shorter end.

... Yeah I think it's because the book was on the shorter end too.

JUST KIDDING! How can you even think that? I enjoyed the book because it was well-written, obviously!

Animal Farm is different from any other classic novel I've read because of the sheer simplicity of everything. I'm not sure if it's because the author is using the point of view of the animals, or if it's simply just Orwell's writing style, but the simplicity of the language paired with the heaviness of the message just kept me spellbound. This is the type of book, I feel, that is truly timeless, not in the way of Shakespeare and Dickens, where  the archaic language reminds us constantly that we are supposed to read and quietly marvel at their literary genius, but instead a book that any generation can read and enjoy at any point in time.

Here now is where our English teachers would chastise us. Shakespeare and Dickens are timeless, they say, because the message that their books bring are always relevant no matter what time period we live in.

It's not this statement that isn't true, but so what? You could have the meaning of life if your story, but if your book makes people feel like you're shoving dried-up sawdust down their throats, then no one's going to read it! In my opinion, the only thing classic books have got going for them right now is the boast of their greatness. People only want to read them because they're classics, and not because they actually find any merit in them.

But I've gotten off-track. The point of this post was to show ou the merits of "Animal Farm", not describe my dislike of every other piece of classical literature in existence (not really... I'm just borrowing from Shakespeare's habit of using hyperboles.)

Aw man, now tha I went on a tangent in the parentheses of that last paragraph, I don't remember my main point anymore. (If you're one of the people who skip over parentheses, why would you do that?! Go back and read it right now! Although I guess if you were one of those people, you wouldn't be reading this either because I put it in parentheses as well... oops.) HA. I speak as if I had a main point to begin with.

So without further ado, let me end with this:

This book was awesome. Goodbye.