Book Review: Watership Down

Yeah that's right! I read stuff too. I recently really started reading a great deal, like a book every 1 to 2 weeks. This started right around the time that I finally accepted my age and got some reading glasses. Prior to that I would get headaches from reading and well, there was a very simple reason for that and it was that I can't see stuff.

At the moment I am subjected to the library of my friend who is a bit of a collector. This is a rarity in Vietnam because most of us are transient and the last thing we want to do is have a bunch of heavy books to transport. He isn't going anywhere because he is married to a Vietnamese person. English books can prove difficult to find in this country as well so meeting him has been a bit of a blessing.

Moving on, let's take a look at the rather famous book Watership Down, by Richard Adams.

_{Proof that I actually have it}

Now this is a children's book for the most part and that is evident early from the start as it revolves around a group of rabbits that live in a warren. That was a word I didn't know before reading this book so thanks Richard Adams, you taught me something.

The characters are nicely presented and we end up focusing on a few central characters that are at first subjects of another warren, and because one of the rabbits in their crew is a bit of a fortune-teller, they set out to flee the impending doom. That's all I am going to say about that because I don't want to spoil the book for people that might be interested in reading it.

I'll start with what I think are the good points of the book:

• It is written in a very easy to understand way and this is why I consider it a children's book despite the fact that it is 600 pages long. There are going to be very few words in this that you would need to look up in a dictionary, as if that was something that people still did.
• The author put a lot of time into describing how rabbits might live and perhaps spent a lot of time understanding rabbits in the wild before authoring this. He even creates a "rabbit language" of sorts where they have different words for various things like "hrudru" for cars because they don't really have much of an understanding of what a car is.
• The chapters are short so you don't get hung up in any one talking point for too long. This is a personal preference of mine because I like to have plenty of stopping points in my books. Chapters that are too long annoy me and one that stands out in my mind happened with the character John Gault in Atlas Shrugged where a speech that he was giving goes on for over 50 pages. That's too long for me to focus on anything, even if it is interesting.
• You start to genuinely care about the various characters and have a good understanding of their individual personalities even though as the author states, most of the rabbits look almost exactly the same

Now because I operate mostly as a pessimist I am also going to point out things that I did not like about the book

• Even though the story is told well, not a great deal actually happens. In the 600 pages in the book there are only about a half a dozen actual meaningful events. The book at times has a "get on with it already" feel to it and while this is just a personal preference, I am kind of impatient when it comes to storytelling.
• There are sometimes entire paragraphs that I would just scan rather than read because it becomes evident very early on in the story that Richard Adams has a penchant for rather elaborate descriptions of surroundings. There are times when two pages would be dedicated to describing the grass next to an entrance to the warren and for me at least, I simply don't care about this level of detail.
• This criticism will get shot down by more serious readers but it is my opinion so it can't possibly be wrong: I think the book is at least twice as long as it needed to be. There is a ton of things that happen in the story that could have been condensed. Again, this is a personal preference but the flowery details of EVERYTHING was something that resulted in me scanning parts of the chapter rather than taking it all in word for word. For some people maybe they appreciate this sort of thing but for me, I would rather someone get to the damn point such as what happened in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Blade Runner) or The Handmaid's Tale.

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Conclusion

I'm happy that I've read this book and now I kind of look forward to watching the mini-series that is advertised on the cover. I had tried to watch it before but found it dreadfully boring perhaps because I hadn't known about the existence of the book, let alone read it.

I think that for adults this book might be a bit too long and perhaps boring because of the aforementioned negatives that I mentioned. Unfortunately there just isn't very much that happens and some readers might think like I did and feel as though they need to friggin get on with it rather than use 40% adjectives in every paragraph.

For younger, more patient readers, this could be something really nice to read because there aren't a lot of complicated words in it that aren't completely made up by the author. He also points out in the footnotes at the bottom of a page what the word actually means so as not to completely confuse readers.

I wouldn't put this on a "must read" list by any means but if you happen to encounter it and have nothing else to read, I can't see any reason to not give it a go. Plus my dog that badly needs a haircut isn't afraid of it and this is always a plus.