I made a joyous discovery in the library yesterday: books on CD! Meaning I can now listen in my car. What a timely entrance... the time for escapism from news has never been more ripe. I always used to gaze jealously at the massive wall of books on tape, because poor little me only has a CD player in her car. A few months ago, there weren't any at the library at all -- interstingly enough, out of the 20 books they now have, 5 or 6 were Toni Morrison and 4 or 5 were Patrick O'Brien novels -- but there wasn't a lot to choose from if you eliminated those two, neither of whom I was in the mood for at the time. So now I have this lovely British man reading "Animal Farm" to me in the car on the way to and from work.

The most striking thing about the book, at this point in my life, is how perfectly parallel, how glaringly obvious, the allegory is. When I first read it, I remember thinking "Cool! It's about Communism! I get it!". This demonstrates that I was either a) a total moron at the time or b) pretty gosh darn young, because Orwell is not too big on the subtlety. I mean, there's a scene where an old leader's skull is put on display and all the animals parade past it. They call each other "comrade." I'm not entirely educated enough to know if each animal leader in the book corresponds to a specific leader in real life, although I don't suppose it really matters all that much. Hey, guess what? Orwell didn't like communism all that much. I fear Animal Farm is taking a turn for the worse -- the horse that was hiding lumps of sugar and pretty ribbons for her mane just disappeared from the farm. That can't be good.