Book 15: Watership Down by Richard Adams

My parents divorced when I was 4, and when my dad picked me up to spend weekends and summers with him, he always took me to the local independent video rental shop beforehand and let me pick out whatever movies I wanted. To him, anything animated was for children. At this time, animated films featuring rodents, such as the Rescuers Down Under and the Secrets of NIMH, were very popular. I was so little that I thought all of these movies were from the same universe, and therefore I asked my dad to rent them for me almost every weekend so I could try to figure out how they were all connected. Watership Down was among these, and the gore in the film didn't strike me as odd since that's how my teachers at school described the crucifixion every day.
Then my dad moved from Des Plaines to Savanna, IL and the Hollywood Video there had a much smaller selection. And then he left altogether. In high school I joined the fringe film society, which rekindled my interest in finding the bizarre animated films of my early childhood. Someone there finally gave me the title of the bizarre animated movie about rabbits, and told me it was based on a book! 

This was another copy I found in my mother's basement, a pattern in my personal library that will become less common from now on. The summer I was 15, I read this book for the first time and immediately adored it. I've probably read this book a dozen times since 2001, although the last was pre-COVID. I still love the film and own my own physical copy, but the book is richer. 

Partly because it's so well written and partly because I love it so much, I read this very quickly - a couple times over 100 pages in one sitting. The hope and humor and mythology in the novel are compelling, especially with the way the US is going. Although I've come a long way from gruesome Catholic school, I still think that those who summarize this book as violent rabbits are missing out. I got this tattoo in '08 and Watership Down is still the only book I could even imagine getting a tattoo of. Roughly 200 books are in queue in this project, and I think when I've finished I'll reread this again.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76620.Watership_Down

The vast majority of the books I've read so far in this project have been fiction, and that pattern is changing now. The next book marks a great shift in both my personal library and also in religious and gender studies altogether. It's a book you've probably never heard of, but it was the beginning in ways that won't be fully articulated until Book 75. 

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