animal farm by george orwell

i was having a 'comment relay' with 2 of my friends on facebook when somehow, this book, animal farm, cropped into our conversation. so during my recent trip back home, i decided to dig this out from my bookshelf...

my dad's copy of the book that i found in the bookshelf years ago...

the first time i read this book, i was quite young. i think i was still in primary school. it being a somewhat thin book and the story quite short, i only took it at its face value: a story about the animals in a farm. being an animal lover since young, i found the story quite interesting and enjoyable. and used to children stories by enid blyton, it did not occur to me how weird it is that the animals could talk and walk upright and create commandments!

the 2nd time i read it, i was in secondary school and have learnt to read my dad's cursive scribblings all over the book. it was then that i realized that this book is NOT about animals, but about stalinism and the events that lead up to world war II. hmm, interesting...

dad's reading assignment during his college days...

dad's jottings and notes filled the book...

then now, looking back to my own literature classes in uni, how come we didn't study george orwell??? it's in so many lists... Time Magazine's 100 best English-language novels (1923 to 2005), Modern Library List of Best 20th Century Novels, Great Books of the Modern World... it also won the Hugo Award in 1996. and it definitely is in MY list of best loved books!

anyway, i believe every literature student should at least know about this book... but seems like that is not the case. i daresay at least 1/2 of my ex-course mates would not have heard of this book. instead, we studied a lot of post-colonial works, both local and abroad, like tan twan eng, shirley lim, nigerian author chinua achebe etc.

i dunno, a bid to instill the spirit of patriotism into the minds of university students by the powers that be, perhaps?

read also:
1) a thousand splendid suns: a blardy good read
2) my childhood friend