here are strange and undeniable gaps in my own personal literary canon. Somehow I managed eighteen years of formal education without reading a single work by Hemingway, Faulkner, Henry James, or the Bronte sisters. No Tolstoy to speak of. The only Dickens I have read is Hard Times, a book that has all but guaranteed I will not pick up another Dickens without some reluctance. I have read Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground but none of his other major works. There are a few willful gaps as well, i.e. books I was assigned but never actually read, leaving a hole in its wake (I’m looking at you Virginia Woolf). Meanwhile other books have appeared in my curriculum on multiple occasions. I have read Their Eyes Were Watching God no less than three times. I was assigned Lolita in two different classes in the same semester during college.

Recently I have made a return to the classics in an attempt to patch up some of those holes (and to enjoy some authors I already know and love, namely Fitzgerald and Wharton). I recently read Daisy Miller, eliminating the Henry James gap once and for all. Having enjoyed it, I may turn to something a little more complicated next month (The Turn of the Screw perhaps). I finally read Hemingway’s famous short story, “Hills Like White Elephants.” Sometime last year I read Garden of Eden which is one of his uncompleted novels. It was probably the worst choice I could’ve made but truthfully, it was the only one that sounded interesting to me. I am going to put my reluctance aside, however, and attempt The Old Man and the Sea and The Sun Also Rises later this year. I don’t foresee myself making more of an effort than that, but with any luck, I’ll love his work, and I’ll be dying to tackle For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms. Last year I tried to read Wuthering Heights and failed. I may reattempt this year or I may just give Jane Eyre a shot instead. So many of these books are in public domain that I feel I might as well just download them for free onto my Kindle app for iPod touch and just read them on the train.

There is one author whose gap I have closed with a resounding slam of the door, tackling his two most famous works this past week. That author, my dear readers, is George Orwell.

Yes, I am one of the nameless rabble who until now had never read Animal Farm or 1984 (the latter being the more egregious offense in my opinion). I gobbled up Animal Farm in a few hours and absolutely loved it! Despite the subject matter, it is, for the most part, a humorous little book. As Christopher Hitchens writes in his introduction, Animal Farm “is biting but essentially good-natured.” If you understand the history of communism in the Soviet Union, the book becomes that much more significant, but even if you don’t, you can still see what Orwell is driving at and appreciate it even on a more superficial level.

1984, on the other hand, has a startling and terrifying quality that I have only encountered one other time in literature, and that is with Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” The utter hopelessness of 1984 combined with the distinct sense that this is all too real, that this can and does, to some extent, happen in some countries and can happen anywhere really, gives it a frightening horror that is difficult to match. Reading it I felt as though these characters had fallen into the Twilight Zone, with no way out to speak of, without even their memories to tie them to their former circumstances (because there are no former circumstances; as the Party deems it to be so, it is so).

While reading, I was struck by many passages, however, this one in particular holds a great deal of truth for me, and serves as a reminder that ignorance can be as dangerous as totalitarianism itself:

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.