Reading Animal Farm with eighth-graders

This particular re-reading of Orwell’s classic novel has been brought to you by my eighth grade English class, who picked Animal Farm over two other books, the names of which I can’t remember right now. The book was almost unilaterally beloved by my class -one girl called it “the exact opposite of a John Greene book”, a comment that she meant as high praise and gave me plenty of chuckles. While not a particularly delicate or subtle piece of satire, I was still very impressed by how much the kids got out of it, considering the lack of knowledge they had of the 20th century political revolutions that informed the novel.

Animal Farm can be a bit heavy-handed, but in light of its fairy-tale sensibilities, this isn’t even a flaw. And it isn’t preachy, which was one of my fears about this re-reading. I loved Animal Farm as a teenager, when I was going through my anarchist and libertarian phases (don’t worry -I never stooped so low as Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead). 1984, while more well-known and having had a greater impact on popular culture, didn’t hold up to my post-university criticisms nearly as well. None of the complaints I had about that book apply here.

Animal Farm demonstrates Orwell’s masterful command of simple, Anglo-Saxon prose on a sentence-by-sentence level. Finding a single passage in here that wouldn’t be a good sample paragraph in a creative writing course would be a challenging task. The book is a pleasure to read, and it reads easily. Having read many of his essays recently, this was not surprising to me. What was surprising, though, was his perfect pacing. I’m not throwing around the superlative lightly -in teaching this book, I’ve read it three times, and the progression of the narrative is literally perfect in a way I’ve seldom encountered in any genre of fiction, although literary fiction is notoriously bad in this regard. This book was educational, and is inarguably a masterpiece.

Recommendation: Read it, re-read it, and read his essays. Goddamn.

Bookhounds -Jr. High Edition:

I’m running a Jr. High Language Arts classroom until the end of the school year. Since I’ll be in there a while, I decide to invest in the youth a bit and set up an in-class library, where students can grab a book to read once they’ve finished the assigned work (to my satisfaction). Since I’ve got a bit of a captive audience, I’ve selected more literary and classic works (that are age and school appropriate) as opposed to get-the-kids-reading-at-all-costs Hail Marys like Diary of a Wimpy Kid or *shudder* Divergent.

I know I’m missing a lot of really good books, but since I’m buying these with my own money -and it’s likely they’ll get thrashed- I’m pleased with what I’ve managed to round up. Gonna keep my eyes out at thrift stores for some favorites, (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) some good non-fiction, and some lower-level stuff.

Reading, Working, Reading

I worked private security for a little over a year as an undergrad. It was one of the worst jobs I’ve ever done. I took it out of absolute financial necessity; it was in the middle of the 2007 recession and my old job of repairing music gear and teaching guitar had completely dried up. The idea of doing something so miserable -with some of the worst people I’ve ever met for co-workers- was sharply juxtaposed against my previous work, happy and fulfilling. The one redeeming quality was that I had time to read. Reading was against company policy, but I routinely worked 12-hour gigs with absolutely nothing whatsoever happening for hours at a time, and if I hadn’t read I would have either slept or become homicidal. Overnight assignments in the oilfields and in commercial buildings made up the majority of my posts, and I had plenty of uninterrupted time between patrol checks.

I read well over 200 books that year. Some of them were for school, some of them were short, and many of them were pulpy science fiction, because much more challenging to read something like The Sound and the Fury or Ulysses when you are isolated and alone at a job you hate. In spite of that, I did read a lot of very good books. I took chances on things I wouldn’t normally, like  Catch-22 and Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which I loved. I didn’t miss the job when I left, but I had a hard time getting in good reading time, because reading was something I had only really done at work, unless it was for a class.

I’m teaching again, now in a more formal setting. I’ve started reading on my lunch break, and on my prep periods (after I’ve finished any necessary prep, of course). I also make sure I crack a book at home after work. Getting in the habit of surfing dumb shit online can suck the life out of me and negatively affect my motivation to write, while getting immersed in a powerful narrative or a provoking essay does exactly the opposite. Make time to read, uninterrupted and with your entire attention.