I’m four days into my new and improved blogging schedule and I’ve already falling behind, because I was too tired to post last night even though the post was already written. This is why I left my weekends open. In the meantime, I’m pressing on with the review I meant to post today. I’ll post yesterday’s book review over the weekend, and everything will be fine.
After I read Oathbringer, I was looking for some shorter books to read, and one of the booktubers I follow recommended Animal Farm by George Orwell. This booktuber led me to some of my favorites of 2018 and 2019—And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer and Longer and Beartown by George Orwell and The Final Empire and The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson—and I didn’t actually read Animal Farm in high school. So I picked it up.
If you don’t know, Animal Farm is about the animals on a farm in England who rise up and overthrow their human owners and then run the farm themselves as a commune, but pretty soon things start descending into a totalitarian regime.
This is going to be a short review, because I don’t have a ton to say. I did not like this book. It was well-written, and I liked watching the animal’s new society fall into totalitarianism—it felt like a natural, well-done descent. But while I recognize that it was well-written, I didn’t like the writing style. It was far too tell don’t show for my taste, and I felt like I was being handed the story and the message without needing to work for it. It was also very, very obvious that Orwell had an agenda when writing this book. He wanted to tell readers that communism is bad. And personally, whether I agree with the message or not, I don’t like books that are written for the purpose of conveying a message, particularly a political or moral message.
As usual, this is one hundred percent my own opinion, and I’d love to discuss whether you agree or disagree with me. So have you read Animal Farm? What did you think?