March will be “Putting the Book in Book Club” month! We’ll discuss two very famous and different novels using pigs as key characters, and both of our selections are still taught (and sometimes censored) in schools around the U.S. and also widely read by people of all ages: Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1945) and Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White, 1952).
Animal Farm is a dystopian satire that can be quite grim, in which Orwell uses animals symbolically to talk about human politics. There is much to talk about regarding the ways that pigs are used symbolically in that widely read allegory about human troubles. Charlotte’s Web is written in a completely different key but with similar things we can discuss about how famous portrayals of pigs in literature shape public perceptions of pigs (and humans) in the world.
You are invited to read both novels before the March meeting, but we know how crunched for time you may be, so we will also put together a BBC Reader for the meeting with chapter segments from each.