Animal Farm (1945) - George Orwell

 

George Orwell’s Animal Farm should still be required reading in middle schools and high schools across the world, but based upon the current embracement of socialism and communism by the young people in this country, I would guess that that’s not generally the case anymore. Animal Farm is the perfect political book for young adult readers. It is a short, satiric fable that uses talking animals to teach a moral lesson, the kind of layered story whose message is clear and hard to forget. 

On its surface, Animal Farm is the story of a bunch of mistreated farm animals belonging to Mr. Jones. With an exception or two, none of the animals on the farm are happy about the way that Mr. Jones treats them, and they are growing unhappier by the day, so when an old boar called Old Major calls for an animal takeover of the Jones farm, the rest of the animals are eager to sign up for the overthrow. The revolution is successful, and the animals rename the farm Animal Farm and vow to live by the “Seven Commandments of Animalism.” Their key commandment is “All animals are equal.”

At first, that seems to be true. But the pigs, because they are the smartest animals on the farm, easily take the lead in setting the farm agenda and allocating work to the other animal types. Soon, the pigs have bent the commandments in their favor, and it gets harder and harder for the working animals to tell the pigs from humans like Mr. Jones. In the end, the pigs have started walking on two legs, they are wearing the clothing Mr. Jones was forced to leave behind, they are sleeping in his bed, they are drinking up the man's liquor, and they are cutting secret deals with neighboring human farmers. 

Animal Farm is a savage take on social revolutions, and how all too often they end up only replacing one set of tyrants for a fresh set of tyrants. All too soon, the animals of Animal Farm learn that the truth is more that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Orwell makes plain that once leaders decide to prioritize their own personal comforts over the political principles they once so adamantly preached, it is the masses that will suffer, all the while being told that it is all for their own good. Orwell wrote Animal Farm during parts of 1943 and 1944, but the novel was not published until 1945 - Stalin being a key World War II ally of Britain and the U.S. - because it was such an obvious criticism of how Stalinism betrayed the Russian Revolution. 

At first, Animal Farm is fun, if maybe a little too cute at times, but as Old Major begins to manipulate the farm animals and consolidate his power, the true horrors of life on Animal Farm strike the reader hard. The book conveys a complex lesson in simple, straightforward way, and that makes what it has to say about the creep of communism all the more difficult to forget. 

Yes, Animal Farm should still be required reading in schools. The book’s lesson has stuck in my head for at least fifty years now, so I can personally attest to both its approach and its overall brilliance.  

A Purple Place for Dying (1964) - John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee is living the good life. He lives comfortably on a Florida houseboat and takes a “salvage consultant”job only when it appeals to his curiosity or when he urgently needs a quick infusion of cash. He’s tall and tanned, the kind of man who can be physically intimidating to other men without really trying while attracting more than his share of women. McGee, though is not your typical “salvage consultant.” He’s the guy you call when you need someone who’s handy with a gun - and you want to keep the whole transaction under wraps.

When Mona Yeoman contacts him about recovering the cash she believes her husband has stolen from her trust fund, McGee is almost broke and he knows that it’s time to go back to work. Mona's offer of a free plane ticket to Arizona, not to mention McGee’s usual hefty fee if he successfully salvages the missing cash, is exactly the kind of job offer he needs. Mona’s timing could not have been more perfect. But things do not go as expected, and just a couple of hours after meeting Mona Yeoman on the ground, McGee finds himself without a client and without any chance of collecting a fee from her. McGee, however, outraged by what he has witnessed, is not ready to call it a day - fee or no fee. He knows he can’t just walk away, but the can of worms he is about to open up is one he never expected. 

A Purple Place for Dying is classic sixties hardboiled stuff that benefits from MacDonald’s fast pacing and his sharp, clean prose. MacDonald is not an author who wasted words, but this third Travis McGee novel still manages a strong sense of place and is filled with multiple interesting characters with problems of their own. But let’s also say that A Purple Place for Dying did not exactly age gracefully, especially in how women are presented. 

Even McGee’s potential client is introduced with misogynistic, almost dismissive, comments that set the tone for every female character to follow - especially the young woman who later becomes a key player in McGee’s investigation. What I, as a modern reader of this 52-year-old novel, find most off-putting are the casual references to putting wives in their place with beatings and spankings. I was in high school in 1964, but I still find it hard to believe that comments like those would not have been offensive to most readers even when the novel was first published. In a more humorous vein is McGee’s assumption that sexually repressed women of the time only need a man like him to help them heal emotionally before they willingly jump into bed with him. But I have to remind myself that, as are the popular James Bond movies of the same era, A Purple Place for Dying is a product of the times from which it sprang, that it was not especially misogynistic in its day.

All of that said, A Purple Place for Dying is a fast paced mystery thriller that today’s mystery fans can still enjoy and appreciate as long as they remember to keep it in the context of its own time. It’s meant to be a novel of escapism, and it is exactly that.

What I’m Reading This Week (6/28/26)

 This past week was not the one I expected it would be. I’ll keep it short, but here’s what happened. Two Texas Highway Patrol troopers rang our doorbell on Tuesday night around ten to tell us that my wife’s only brother had been killed in an auto accident about three hours earlier. Because my wife is her brother’s closest living relative, we have been going almost non-stop for the last few days making all the necessary arrangements. The funeral is tomorrow - all of this is taking place out of town - but the process of putting all of his affairs in place will take months. 

I had very little reading time last week, and won’t have a whole lot more anytime soon, but I did finish a 1964 novel by John D. MacDonald called A Purple Place for Dying. The novel reads like a near-satire of the genre, but I’m not sure if that’s what MacDonald intended at the time it was published, or if it has just aged badly. 

I was looking for some lighter reading to add to the books I have in progress right now, and remembered reading that several of you have already read Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth. I love the premise of an 81-year-old serial killer with a sense of humor. It sounded like fun, and through the first 45 pages, it’s proving to be exactly that. I’m still to the point of getting familiar with all of Mabel’s neighbors and her childhood background, but it’s already quite a cast of memorable characters. 

One whole side of my family tree traces its North American roots to Nova Scotia and the years in which the British were expelling the French settlers from that part of Canada. I know that history in a general fashion, but have been getting curious to learn more of the details. Dean Jobb, at least so far, seems to be a pretty readable historian, and I’m looking forward to getting some answers about the expulsion that saw half my family end up in southern Louisiana where it met and married the German half. Acadian Saga is one of the better histories on Cajun history that I could find.

That’s if for now. We are leaving town again in the morning, and even though it’s only a two-hour drive, it’s one I’ll be making over and over in the next few weeks. I’ll be checking in and out as I can, and I look forward to seeing what you are all reading. 

The Dying Light (2026) - Ann Cleeves

 

The Dying Light is the fourth novel in the Two Rivers series featuring Detective Inspector Matthew Venn which began in 2019 with The Long Call. Series author Ann Cleeves is a veteran series writer who is best known for her eleven-book Vera Stanhope series and her nine-book Shetland series, but she is also the author of two earlier series. 

Readers of Ann Cleeves fiction know, first and foremost, to expect an atmospheric British setting, most usually some remote rural or coastal spot where the investigation is at least somewhat dependent on what the landscape is willing to surrender to police. Faithful readers know, too, that investigations will be further complicated by relatively small, tight-knit communities filled with long-held grudges, secret affairs, lots of gossip, and an unshakable sense that everyone has something to hide. 

The Dying Light offers plenty of all of that.

The story begins when Lottie, a seventeen-year-old girl, is found dead in the swimming pool of politician Paul Armstrong’s North Devon holiday home. Further complicating what is already expected to be a delicate investigation, Armstrong’s daughter Hannah - Lottie’s best friend - is nowhere to be found. Only the night before, the girls had managed to irritate the locals at a small music festival to such a degree that Venn and his team (DS Jen Rafferty and DC Ross May) have no shortage of suspects and motives to sift through. 

A big part of the appeal of series fiction is in watching the repeating characters change and grow over time, and Cleeves, a master of this, takes the time here to further evolve each of her main characters. Series readers will not be surprised to learn that Venn, as a result of his strict, cult-like religious upbringing, is still struggling with self-doubt and anxiety - even to the degree that Jen is at times the more effective investigator of the pair.Venn, however, is becoming more and more self-aware with each book, and his efforts to become more self-confident allow him to give Jonathan, his husband, the emotional support Jonathan needs in his struggle to resolve issues from his own past. Jen, not a native of North Devon, is feeling less and less the team outsider now, and she and young Ross are finally starting to put their rivalry aside long enough to trust each other.

The Dying Light is a fine addition to the formidable Ann Cleeves collection of well written murder mysteries. If you’re already into her Vera or Shetland books, this series is for you.

What I’m Reading This Week (6/20/26)

 The four books I finished up in the last couple of weeks were kind of hit and miss:

• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy - this one proved to be more difficult, and way less impressive, than I anticipated, as you can tell by the review I’ve already posted,
• Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne - a re-read that I think was even more fun than the first time I read this classic,
• Animal Farm by George Orwell - an almost perfect reminder of the dangers of socialism and communism that should be required reading in every high school and university in the free world, and
• The City of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón - the author’s last work, a collection of eleven short stories, that I have to admit disappointed me a little.

A couple of the usual suspects are still with me, including The Camp of Saints, an eerily prophetic book about the impact of sudden mass migration on the West. And of course, I’m still reading the Twain biography, which seems to be turning into a year-long project now. The other two holdovers are John D. MacDonald’s A Purple Place for Dying and Ann Cleeves’s The Dying Light, two very different murder mysteries. I’m nearly finished with both, but as usual, I still haven’t figured out who the bad guy is in either of them.

And these are the four new ones I’ve started reading:

From Here to Eternity, the 1951 debut novel by James Jones that won the National Book Award and became a huge bestseller. It follows a U.S. Army infantry company stationed in Hawaii just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I’ve neither read the novel, nor watched the big movie version of it, so I’m very curious about this one. I do know that it caused a bit of a sensation because it threw around “f-bombs” on a scale highly unusual for the time.

The Cyclist is the second book in Tim Sullivan’s D.S. Cross series. Cross is a brilliant detective on the autism spectrum whose style is as off-putting to his co-workers as it is to those he meets during his investigations. The titles of each of the books in the series reference the victims, as far as I can tell. I’ve only just started reading The Cyclist, but I find George Cross to be as fascinating a lead character as I did in the first book in the series.

I read George Meegan’s The Longest Walk for the first time in the late eighties, and that experience was one of the main drivers in my lifelong fascination with books about long walks or long road trips. Meegan began his long walk on the southernmost tip of South America on January 26, 1977 and almost seven years later, on September 18, 1983 he finished it on the northernmost beaches of Alaska. I’m just over 60 pages into this re-reading of The Longest Walk, and I’m already in awe of what Englishman Meegan and his Japanese wife endured.

Eifelheim is the one that has surprised me the most so far of this whole batch of books. It’s a clever mash up of historical fiction and first contact science fiction that seems to have been really well researched. In this instance, first contact is made in the year 1348 and the local German priest is the first human to make contact with the insect-like aliens who have crash-landed in the forest surrounding his village. Lots of scientific theory, medieval history, and theology in this one.

We’re going to be a little busier than usual around here next week, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for reading, but some of these are going to be hard to resist for long. I hope you all are doing well and enjoying life. Read on. 

Blood Meridian (1985) - Cormac McCarthy - Overrated?

 

Cormac McCarthy is said to be one of the best authors ever produced in America, and Blood Meridian is said to be his finest novel. The man’s prose has been compared to that of  both Faulkner and  Hemingway, as different as those two styles are. The influence of both men on McCarthy is readily evident in Blood Meridian, as is the prose style utilized in the Old Testament and in Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s all there, and that’s what made Blood Meridian such a difficult read for me.

The back cover of this 25th Anniversary Edition  describes the novel this way:

“Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian is an epic novel that traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world in which the market for Indian scalps is thriving."

And that does pretty much sum up this rather plotless novel. 

Once the Kid throws in with the Glanton gang, he rides from massacre to massacre gathering scalps to be sold for the bounty offered by the Mexican governors of Chihuahua and Sonora. At first only hostile Indians are attacked, but when no more hostiles are to be found, the gang wipes out a peaceful village populated by the peaceful Tigua Indian tribe. Even that doesn’t satisfy the bloodlust and greed of the gang, so they turn to wiping out small Mexican villages and mining camps - and passing off the scalps of their victims as having been taken from hostile Indians. Any encounter with the Glanton gang is guaranteed to be a violent one, and no one south of the border is safe from them.

There are a few notable characters in the gang, including its leader John Glanton and the Kid, but the most memorable of them all is a huge, hairless philosopher simply called the Judge. The Judge starts out as Glanton’s right-hand man but soon develops such a powerful influence and hold on Glanton, that it is really the Judge who dictates the gang’s downward spiral. Without his presence, it is likely enough that the gang would never have devolved into the nightmarish death machine that it became. The Judge is all-powerful, and McCarthy by making all characters so secondary to him, emphasizes his dominance. 

It was for stylistic reasons - not for the abundance of extreme violence and cruelty on display - that I found Blood Meridian to be such a difficult book to finish. Cleverly, McCarthy surrounds the sudden flashes of violence and bloodletting with much longer sections of mind-numbing travel and terrain descriptions. This gives the reader a feeling very similar to what the gang experiences between its murderous raids. Much of that prose reads like a cross between Faulkner and the authors of the Old Testament, and as beautiful as it probably is, it is still quite a chore to read a dozen or so straight pages of it before something else finally “happens.”

This one sentence is typical of that kind of writing:

“They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses’ legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwariors pendant form their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.” 

So do I personally think Blood Meridian is one of the best American novels of all time? No, not by a long shot. For such a violent book, it feels very repetitive. Even the violence, which is at first is so shocking, loses its punch after a while, and the story really is just one of a gang riding around committing one atrocity after another. None of the characters, including the Judge and the Kid, are developed well enough to make them seem particularly real, and there is no big payoff at the end of the novel to make me feel that it was all worth the effort of working my way through McCarthy’s almost impenetrable prose.

(From what I understand, Blood Meridian rates high on the list of “novels started but not finished,” so I do get a tiny sense of satisfaction for having finished it on my first attempt - unlike the half-dozen or so tries it took me to get through Moby Dick. So there’s that.)