Animal Farm
Orwell's barnyard fable of a revolution that devours itself: the animals overthrow the farmer, and the pigs who lead them slowly become him. He wrote it as a frontal attack on Stalin's USSR while most of the British left still wanted the Soviet ally flattered, and four publishers turned it down for being impolitic. The miracle is that it outlived its occasion — every betrayed revolution since reads like a gloss on it. Short enough to finish in an afternoon, and impossible to forget the last line.
Map Napoleon to Stalin, Snowball to Trotsky, Boxer to the betrayed proletariat, and you have done everything the book asks of you. It is an allegory with one key, and once turned, nothing else opens. Brilliant as a pamphlet, thin as a novel; the animals are positions, and rereading it as an adult adds almost nothing you missed at fourteen.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
