Never read Melville, and didn’t get into anything heavy until lit classes in high school. I have a niece who’s 12. Atlas Shrugged might be a bit much for her, but next time I go home, she will be getting my copy of Animal Farm.
Excellent! It’s never too early. She’ll love it. I read Animal Farm in 4th grade. It was in our school library. It set my political course, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I just knew that some governments could be very unfair and mean, and the people who ran those countries were called dictators. My dad probably told me what a dictator was. By the time I was in sixth grade, our teacher told us how evil and ruthless the Soviet Union was and what the hammer and sickle stood for. I remember asking her if Khrushchev was a dictator.