Watership Down

I'm a knowledge-hungry book-obsessed nerd, but also a really busy dad with combined-type ADHD, so it is a cause of celebration for me when I finish a book, although this time, I will admit to a certain melancholy as I don't think I wanted Watership Down to end. Most things do of course, while others only seem that way, but the cycle really begins again, like the seasons.

This novel was truly a grand adventure. The characters grow, we commiserate, we identify, we cheer; all within a setting that the author knows intimately well, painting a picture of life through the seasons, seen through souls whose eyes move through the grasses of the down, and whose perceptions are formed from a physical place where only a human's foot passes. If one were to read the plot alone, it wouldn't seem like the freshest storyline, but Richard Adams does it justice and then some. Although I took issue with what I saw as some charcter-based contrivances, they just didn't mute the novel's impact, especially in its epilogue, up to its very last line.

Home. It's what we work & fight for every day. So did Fiver, Bigwig, Blackberry, and of course Hazel-rah when they journeyed away from theirs in search of a better - and perhaps their true - home.

In my very humble opinion, Watership Down is much more than the sum of its parts, which is why it endures to this day.