Re:Real Classics (Score 2)

Certainly it's worth reading classics that are important to the culture you live in. However I can't let you get away with claiming that George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 are American classics. They're British classics, or classics in the English language generally, but not American classics. (Don't take this the wrong way: as an Englishman Heller's Catch-22 (& to a lesser extent Somegthing Happened) both speak to me and I regard them as classics in the English language.) BTW, why does everyone seem to be so taken with 1984 and yet no-one refers to a book which was (I think) called 1985 by Anthony Burgess which is to my mind a much more frightening and realistic version of the kind of things that may happen in an unpleasant future?