Being a not-so-avid reader, I mentally groaned as my Honors English teacher introduced the concept of reading yet another book for class, which unfortunately became one of the most terrible books I have read to date. Animal Farm by George Orwell- my gruesome lullaby lacked absolutely nothing in helping me fall asleep. The unchanged boring setting, the countless characters, as well as the unbelievable fantasies did the poor book no better.

Animal Farm continued in a consistent setting with no changes whatsoever, not allowing me to visualize much, if anything at all. Throughout the entire book, there was no use of descriptive elements except for the introduction of the animals in the opening scene of Old Major recounting his dream, and that too, was quite brief. From there on, up to the end of the book no other visuals were created. Not only were few things described, but Orwell also did not use a sufficient amount of rhetorical devices except for the main ones which included allegory and satire, and were quite obvious. Preferring the ability to envision scenes in my head, Animal Farm grew increasingly boring and rigid in its fixed overall structure of sentences, descriptions and so forth.

With such dull and boring visuals already, the author loses his audience due to the extensive amount of characters. There were so many animals who definitely deserved a character list, but even then the characters were so many. As a reader, I assume that either Orwell had not kept his audience in mind, which in this case would be sophomores, or the teachers assigning this book did not keep in mind that the book is to be read by sophomores. After all, logically speaking, few teens are interested in reading a fantastical book about talking animals who characteristically resemble significant roles of the Russian Revolution. Neither the Russian Revolution nor Animal Farm were, from any angle or concept, relatable to an average teen of the twenty-first century. As I suffered from an unbelievable amount of boredom, I attempted to conclude the short book sometime soon while comparing it to the Russian Revolution. While reading with some prior knowledge about the Russian Revolution, I discovered that the two did have an immense amount of similarities and the allegorical references were also quite remarkable, yet that proves to be no excuse for the indescribable monotony received by reading this literary work.

Anyhow my allegations are certainly not weak and may be supported by the majority opinion of the sophomore class who recently completed the book, Animal Farm. Therefore, I bid good luck to the future sophomores who will be forced to read Orwell’s book as an assignment and face such dreariness!