Watership Down
Watership Down is the compelling tale of a group of wild rabbits struggling to hold onto their place in the world—soon to be a BBC and Netflix animated miniseries starring James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, and Oscar and Grammy award-winning Sir Ben Kingsley. A phenomenal worldwide bestseller for more than forty years, Richard Adams's Watership Down is a timeless classic and one of the most beloved novels of all time. Set in England's Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, courage and survival follows a band of very special creatures on their flight from the intrusion of man and the certain destruction of their home. Led by a stouthearted pair of brothers, they journey forth from their native Sandleford Warren through the harrowing trials posed by predators and adversaries, to a mysterious promised land and a more perfect society.
Stats for nerds
24recommend
56mentions
50people
2007–2026years
46% recommend52% neutral2% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > “If you are bored with this novel after three pages, you shouldn’t read any further.”
The concept of DNF (“did not finish”) is pretty familiar to people who read regularly, but three pages seems far too early to make that call. The general rule of thumb I’ve encountered is closer to 100 - 150 pages.
Some of the most memorable works of literature I’ve read are books I didn’t particularly enjoy for the first hundred pages or more. I stuck with them mostly because I deliberately give books time to develop before deciding whether they’re for me.
My favorite example is A Tale of Two Cities. I didn’t enjoy it all that much until Book Three, Chapter 12. From there, it was smooth sailing. It’s now one of my favorite stories I’ve ever read, and I still think about it often, especially that entire final book.
That doesn’t mean every book takes that long for me. There are plenty I enjoy from the very beginning, particularly stories retold from a character’s perspective, adventure stories like Watership Down, and pretty much any Sherlock Holmes novel.
I understand the idea of putting a book down after a few pages if you don’t connect with it, and ultimately everyone should read however they want. But I do think that, by doing so, you risk missing out on some genuinely great books simply because they needed more time to become what made them worth reading.
Side note: My actual criteria for dropping a book are a little different. I tend to stop when reading it gives me a kind of vertigo or that strange feeling where your throat tightens and you start to feel sick.
- Watership Down by Richard Adams
- I can't recall a whole story or genre that plays with this concept to such an extent, but I've seen it pop up from time to time in all kinds of fiction.
First example that pops to mind: If you read that completely enthralling and wonderful novel Watership Down by Richard Adams, its told entirely from the perspective of Rabbits, and beautifully so. There are several scenes, especially one featuring their first encounter with a colossal freight train and its engine, described completely from their perspective, with no knowledge of what these man-made machines are. It's right up the alley of the horror concept you mention.
- Have Space Suit Will Travel (Heinlein)
Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (one story in the book "Different Seasons" by Stephen King)
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)
Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky)
Frankenstein (Shelley)
Brave New World (Huxley)
Farenheit 451 (Heinlein)
Never Cry Wolf (Mowatt)
A Whale for the Killing (Mowatt)
The Machine Stops (Forster)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Starship Troopers (Heinlein)
The Jungle Book (Kipling)
Lost in the Barrens (Mowatt)
The Republic (Plato)
Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke)
Ringworld (Niven)
The Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison)
The Hobbit (Tolkien)
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson)
The Odyssey (Homer)
The Man who Would be King (Kipling)
The Pearl (Steinbeck)
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick)
A Scanner Darkly (Dick)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
Dracula (Stoker)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)
A Christmas Carol (Dickens)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll)
Watership Down (Adams)
Gulliver's Travels (Swift)
Animal Farm (Orwell)
- I'm in my 50s and I used to read a lot for pleasure when I was a kid. I still remember reading Lord of the Rings or Watership Down over an entire weekend, with my mom yelling at me to stop reading and eat dinner, etc. Books like To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye changed my life as a youth.
I stopped reading fiction after I graduated college because I simply didn't care anymore, it was like an off switch. Unless it was a computer or finance textbook, I simply didn't care to read. There was a brief hiatus after reading Moneyball and Blind Side which fascinated me for some reason, and I haven't read non-textbooks since then either. I think part of it was that I read so many bad fiction books I didn't want to waste my time taking a chance when I could be programming or learning more directly.
- Watership Down is mostly traumatising as a cartoon. I've read the book last year, and it feels a lot more as a deeply mythologic piece than a psychedelic horror. It's essentially a shorter Lord of the Rings, with bunnies. Highly recommended.
(Also, the recent Netflix adaption of the material is a lot closer to the source material than the 1980s-era cartoon).
