Everyone should read Animal Farm and 1984. I read the family copy of Animal Farm 8th grade summer, and we regularly quoted Animal Farm back and forth growing up. I later read Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margerita and enjoyed it but when I had a Russian girlfriend she explained that I didn't understand it at all. It was the Russian Animal Farm but you really had to know Russian history to understand the allegories.

I read Down and Out my first year of college. What stuck with me was his idea that it is very expensive to be poor.

I read Shooting an Elephant for an English class. It's hard not to think of the pointlessness of the Great Game when thinking about Afghanistan.

Politics and the English Language, Notes on Nationalism, ...

Orwell was a great writer. Hitchens wanted to be Orwell. Hitchens was good but, nope, not Orwell. Hitchens was unbelievably wrongly wrong about Iraq and would never admit it. He should have re-read Shooting an Elephant very slowly, very carefully, with a long suffering English lecturer patiently getting its point across. It'd help if he'd actually lived there instead of just wearing a Kurdish pin.