elfkin477, the trouble I see with Animal Farm is that it’s just a straight history book, only with pigs. “OK, this one is Stalin, and that one is …” That’s heavy-handed and (to my taste) boring. 1984, on the other hand, has real characters in a situation, and a plot to follow the implications. Sure, it looks at some of the same issues as Animal Farm, but carried further and at a personal level.
If the schools think 1984 is dated while Animal Farm is not, somebody isn’t looking beyond the titles.
Nothing against it, really. I’m personally not a fan of Hemingway. But my real disagreement here is just that I think 1984 is so well-known, and such a common cultural reference, that reading it ought to be part of any decent education.
I read 1984 as a sophomore in high school in 1984. Twenty years later, my daughter read Animal Farm as a freshman in 2004.
The most fascinating part of 1984 that sticks out in my mind is how history is fluid. I love how the protagonist’s job is to revise yesterday’s newspapers to reflect what actually happened, even down to correcting the weather report.
Sort of like “We’re looking for WMD’s.” “What WMD’s, we’re liberating the people!” Remember 9/11!" By the end of it, no one will remember what really started the whole mess. Or, maybe, even care.
I have a very vague memory of watching TV New Year’s Eve 1983, and the people we were watching were talking (tongue-in-cheek, in retrospect, but they seemed serious to me then) about how we might all wake up in the morning to find the world had transformed into the Big Brother world. Freaked me out a bit back then, that did.
FTR, I read 1984 in high school, and had to read Animal Farm like three or four times in different years. The last time, in high school, was an advanced English class that was being taught by a clueless student teacher. We spent WAAAAAY too much time discussing it, especially since everyone in the class had already studied it at least twice before. We spent days and days divided up into study groups researching mind-numbingly obvious topics (what does the horse symbolize? Spent the next week figuring it out). I remember that our group once burst into song in the middle of class. We sang that “beasts of England” song from the book out of sheer boredom. The teacher sort of froze with that deer-in-the-headlights look.