Act of Cultural Vandalism - Animal Farm does Teach Kids to be Nice to Animals

Posted on Facebook earlier today, realting to this story that was trending that day.

This Shilpa Shetty "Animal Farm" thing is just the thing a Cultural Vandal was made for.

The idea she "made a mistake thinking its a book about been kind to animals" is so simplistic and lazy in analysis. To anyone who has read the George Orwell "fairy tale" (including me) one message you'll get is "This is not how to treat a nation of people." In other words, the message of "be nice to others (including animals)" exists in Animal Farm, so Shetty's words are not as "dumb" as you may think.
Also, most kids today reading Animal Farm will not get the Stalin reference. What they will see is a very bad pig mistreating other animals. Kids don't see the world in the same way "cynical" adults (with knowledge of history) do. Most media critics don't realise this when they talk about children's literature (and other things, including cartoons and video games).
I read between the lines, and looking at this story, I see that Shilpa Shetty is a bit smarter than the average twitter user. Books can have multiple messages, from be nice to animals to why Stalin is a bad guy.
#AnimalFarm #ShilpaShetty

Inktober 2016 - Book Covers

Last year I discovered the Inktober challenge. 

For every day in October participants must...

1. Make a drawing in ink (you can do a pencil under-drawing if you want).
2. Post it on your blog (or tumblr, instagram, twitter, facebook, flickr, Pinterest or just pin it on your wall.)
3. Hashtag it with #inktober and #inktober2016
4. Repeat

This year's theme came from James, the head of the book club I'm a member of. He suggested book covers of books the club has read. I liked it. I asked him in September to write up a list of 31 books of his choosing for me to do. Not all of them were read by the club (and I have only read one-third of them), but that didn't matter.

Here is the list (including notes and typos).

And here are the covers I have made for Inktober 2016

This one was drawn while I was in Rai Con, so I had a lot of inspiration for this one.

I made a huge mistake in this one. The calendar is supposed to be July, not May (I may have been thinking about my birthday when the mistake was made.)