Watership Down: Richard Adams

It is a well-known fact that all right-thinking people, the world over, love bunnies. And if they don't there's something seriously wrong with them.

The truth is that I put off reading Watership Down for a long time, largely because of the usual OH GOD THAT IS SO SAD YOU WILL CRY which comes up every time it is mentioned. I have no tear ducts, being made entirely out of felt and stuffing, and I thought this might prove problematic. I wouldn't want to accidentally drown myself from the inside. But then again, the prospect of a really good story about bunnies was appealing so off I went.

Here comes the pretentious part then. It's not a book about bunnies, really. Well, it is. But it's really a kind of epic adventure, featuring companionship, brotherhood, love, war, politics, life and death... and freaking BUNNIES. The same species that will kill themselves chewing through your electrical wires.  The same species that gets happier at the sight of cabbage than anyone has any right to be. And it's true to bunnies and bunny behaviour (well I say that. I actually don't know that much about wild bunnies so I may be all wrong. Maybe they actually live on sauerkraut and like to play shuffleball under the full moon). The whole story takes place over a few miles, over a few weeks, and features insights into destiny, folklore, human nature and the horrors of totalitarian rule. Which does rather make you wonder what Adams would have managed with a slightly larger and less stupid species as his protagonists. Plus it teaches you how to say "eat shit" in Lapine.

The main point I want to make, though, is that this raises the bar a touch. All you idiots out there (*cough C. Golden cough*) who set out to write an epic, with a full compliment of humans, orcs, elves, dwarves and so on, in a world with every possible kind of terrain and culture, with a ton of back story - and only manage the kind of dull, cliche-ridden bilge that makes me want to chew my own hubcaps off can hraka silflay as far as I'm concerned.