Couldn't find the right edition anywhere convenient :(
Bonus:
I'll run out of trailers eventually.
Summary: Animal Farm good, two intros bad.
Commentary: I'm using the Signet Classics edition, simply because that's the one I found at work. Since it's not a translation (or even a particularly annotated edition) I don't see how it makes much difference.
I got through the preface by Russel Baker (undated) and introduction by C.M. Woodhouse (1954)
The preface introduced the excellent essay I looked at the other day, but I don't know that I agree with its conclusions.
What all had in common was a depressing pessimism about the future. Like so much other writing of the era, they rested on the assumption that individuals were no match for the efficient new technology at the disposal of totalitarian politicians.
[...]
Well, here we are in that future that so many writers fifty years ago could only guess at, and what do we see? They were ludicrously wrong about the amazing efficiency with which totalitarians would destroy individualism.
I'm not sure which future Baker is living in, but it feels pretty hard to argue that we "won" against the 1984 future. Even people in "free" countries are under a state of constant surveillance, people are getting rounded up for social media posts, etc. We're not 100% lost, but it's hard to look at any other time in the last century that we've been much worse off in terms of freedom from various forms of totalitarianism on a global scale.
Woodhouse's intro is messy. It jumps around, seems to contradict itself, and is full of long awkward sentences. I considered going through with a highlighter and marking all of Orwell and Strunk's sins in it, but it didn't feel like it was worth the time.
Actual book tomorrow, hopefully a large improvement.
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