Okay, so I’ve been totally slacking with BQ. I’m not entirely sure why. I know why I’ve been taking my time with The Big Money – I need to concentrate a bit more to keep the characters apart, and I haven’t had enough focus lately. But I don’t know why my most recent BQ read took me so long. I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to reading it, and I don’t know why it took so long for me to get through.
Because I really enjoyed Richard Adams’s Watership Down. It’s been one of the books on my “to be read” list for years. Since sixth or seventh grade, if you can believe it, as one of my fellow bookworms just could not get her nose out of that book one year. But it kept getting pushed down the list by other books until now.
It’s not completely a bad thing that it took me so long, though. Because I suspect I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it quite as much as a ten- or eleven-year-old reader. It’s not a “children’s book,” per se, and it’s just so involved – you’ve got the main plotline, the informative bits about rabbit behavior, the underlying mythology, and so on.
And a big plus? The characters are nowhere as anthropomorphized as, say, Brian Jacques’s Redwall mice. Okay, so the rabbits talk, but they don’t wear clothes and swing swords and have the most improbable feasts; they do actually share instincts and behaviors with their real-life counterparts. They’re fully realized despite – or rather, because – of these behaviors.
Two enthusiastic thumbs up from me.
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