Why I picked it up 
 One of those classics which I think we were all supposed to read in school, but which slipped through the cracks and which I never got around to. 
 What I want to remember about it 
 + It was not imaginative or original in the sense that it was a one-to-one analogy of the Russian revolution wrapped up as a fairy tale, a parable. If the road to 1984 is a journey of a thousand steps, then Animal Farm was the first step. 
 + The book is obviously a cultural touchstone, and it's nice to have found the origin of such refrains as "four legs good, two legs bad" and "... some are more equal than others." 
 + I continued to think that Snowball would come back at some point, that there would be some kind of showdown or conflict besides the ones fabricated by Napoleon's crew. 
 + The slaughters after the hens' rebellion was an analog to Stalin's purges, and was important to conveying the growing tyranny and oppression, but it seemed really out of nowhere--which I guess is how it may happen in such an environment--and I didn't understand the voluntary false confessions from the animals.