Animal farm is a fantastic book. That's been obvious for decades. No need to expound on that.

The one thing that keeps me from rating this at a five is that Orwell seems to present the idea that everything's shit all the way down. At the time Animal Farm was published, we were seeing the fall of fascism with capitalism and communism coming to the forefront as the two competing ideologies for the modern era. Orwell's critique of communism is blatantly obvious through his retelling of the Russian revolution and the rise of Stalinism (or Napoleonism in this case, I suppose). A bit more subtle is his critique of capitalism through the greed of the farmers (especially Mr. Jones) and the way the pigs slowly take more and more of the animals' labour to fuel their own extravagance and turn more human-like. Both critiques are valid, but since Orwell obviously isn't advocating for fascism it leaves a bit of a gap where he seems to think the working class is screwed no matter what they do.

Part of the magic of Animal Farm is the way it reads like an old fable teaching you a lesson. Unfortunately, its message is entirely negative: communism sucks because people are going to be greedy and abuse it, and capitalism sucks because it encourages people to be greedy and abusive. I prefer my fables to give some action to move forward in a better way instead of just reinforcing how crappy life is.