RATING (BASED ON PERSONAL SCALE): 3.00/5 — A good book! Didn’t blow me away, but I liked it. → I had a general sense of the characters, but they didn’t stay with me.

MY TAKE: IMPORTANT, EFFECTIVE… BUT NOT PERSONAL

THOUGHTS & FEELS: I read this as a teenager during what I now recognize was a full dystopian era for me. Assigned reading + self-selected “this feels intellectually impressive” books = a lot of collapsing societies in a short amount of time.

So when I think about Animal Farm, it feels… slightly hazy.

I remember the structure. The rebellion. The hopeful beginning. The slow, almost quiet shift of power. The commandments changing in subtle ways. That creeping realization that the new leadership isn’t better, it’s just rebranded.

And that part? Brilliant.

The messaging is clear without being complicated. You don’t need a political science degree to understand what’s happening. The corruption feels inevitable in a way that’s unsettling but not overdramatic. It’s sharp. Efficient. Intentional.

But emotionally? I never latched onto anyone.

Napoleon represents power consolidating in plain sight. Snowball feels like the “what could have been.” And Boxer... sweet, loyal, devastating-in-theory Boxer, should have destroyed me.

Intellectually, I understand why Boxer is tragic. Emotionally… I don’t remember feeling wrecked.

And I think that’s where the disconnect lives for me. The writing is direct and almost restrained. Orwell doesn’t linger in feelings, he presents events and lets you interpret them. That makes the book effective. But it kept me observing instead of fully immersed.

Maybe if I reread it now, I’d connect differently. Maybe teenage me had already read too many stories about propaganda and power to let this one stand apart.

What I’m left with isn’t a vivid emotional memory. It’s more like a concept I absorbed.

BOTTOM LINE: A concise, smart political story that absolutely earns its place as a classic, but for me, it blended into my larger dystopian phase instead of carving out its own emotional space.

RATING (BASED ON PERSONAL SCALE): 3.00/5 — A good book. Didn’t blow me away, but I liked it. → I had a general sense of the characters, but they didn’t stay with me.

MY TAKE: IMPORTANT, UNSETTLING… AND SLIGHTLY DULL

THOUGHTS & FEELS: I read this as a teenager because I was bored at home and spotted it on one of my sister’s bookshelves. No school assignment. No deeper plan. Just curiosity and a quiet afternoon.

And I swear, the cover is permanently seared into my brain. The sterile, futuristic imagery. The controlled calm. It felt significant before I even opened it.

As a teen, I didn’t fully grasp all the philosophical layers, but I absolutely understood the unease. A world engineered for stability. Emotions flattened. People conditioned not to question their place. Pleasure used as distraction. Even if I couldn’t articulate it, something about that felt deeply wrong.

I remember Bernard feeling painfully out of place in a world built for conformity. Lenina almost unsettled me in how naturally she accepted everything as it was. And John... poor John, was the only one who felt like he carried genuine emotional weight, even if he also felt more symbolic than fully human.

What I remember most, though? I was… kind of bored.

The ideas are sharp. The critique of consumerism, comfort, and control is clear. The use of soma as a tool to erase discomfort instead of confront it definitely stuck with me. But the characters felt distant, more like vehicles for philosophy than people I connected to. I respected what the book was doing more than I enjoyed reading it.

Looking back, I appreciate it more than I did at the time. But it never became something I loved.

BOTTOM LINE: A dystopian classic packed with big ideas about control and manufactured happiness. Intellectually compelling, emotionally distant. I admired it, I just didn’t feel it.