{"id":967,"date":"2018-02-07T15:00:29","date_gmt":"2018-02-07T22:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/?p=967"},"modified":"2018-04-14T17:50:15","modified_gmt":"2018-04-14T23:50:15","slug":"book-watership-down-1975","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/2018\/02\/07\/book-watership-down-1975\/","title":{"rendered":"BOOK: Watership Down (1975)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><u><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/images.gr-assets.com\/books\/1404703348l\/7668714.jpg\" alt=\"Watership Down\" width=\"318\" height=\"463\" \/>Watership Down<br \/>\n<\/u><\/strong>Year: 1975<br \/>\nAuthor: Richard Adams<br \/>\nLength: 953 minutes \/ 15.88 hours<\/p>\n<p>In an ever-increasing list of books I failed to read as a child, I finally managed to get to <em>Watership Down<\/em>. While I am aware that many people speculate the true meaning of the book to be an allegory for Nazis or Communism, or whatever, the prologue provided by the author in this edition stated that it was merely a bedtime story for his children. With this in mind, I\u2019m sure many subconscious influences led to some of the themes in <em>Watership Down<\/em>. Either way, the story seemed to be a rambling series of events that didn\u2019t have much of a point or purpose.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s be clear: I like rabbits. I think they\u2019re cute, and I even own two of them. Therefore, I appreciate the little details of lagomorph mannerisms sprinkled throughout. And yet, there were a few confusing choices made in this book, like giving a somewhat-confusing \u201crabbit language\u201d that rarely had context, and was mostly abandoned by the end of the book. I also couldn\u2019t buy into the idea of a \u201crabbit army\u201d since most of the rabbits I\u2019ve seen in the wild have been mostly solitary animals, and hardly in the numbers described in <em>Watership Down<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>When it comes right down to it, the thing that perhaps disturbed me the most about this book was the anthropomorphism of the rabbits. Sure, the \u201cside stories\u201d about El-Ahrairah were distracting and often unnecessary, and I couldn\u2019t honestly tell you the character traits or attributes of any of the numerous rabbits, but the fact that they could talk to each other made them seem somewhat human. Consequently, this then introduces ideas like war and sex trafficking via the \u201cinnocent\u201d covering of rabbits. I feel these tend to be mostly human traits, so it pulled me from the story when I had to remind myself, \u201cWait, these are rabbits.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A meandering story that puts humans in rabbit bodies, I give <em>Watership Down<\/em> 2.5 stars out of 5.<\/p>\n<h2><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\" \/>\u00a0<strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\" \/>\u00a01\/2<\/strong><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Watership Down Year: 1975 Author: Richard Adams Length: 953 minutes \/ 15.88 hours In an ever-increasing list of books I failed to read as a child, I finally managed to get to Watership Down. While I am aware that many people speculate the true meaning of the book to be an allegory for Nazis or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,54],"tags":[293,55,1100,8,1098,1099],"class_list":["post-967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2-5-stars","category-book","tag-293","tag-book","tag-rabbits","tag-review","tag-richard-adams","tag-watership-down"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=967"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1107,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967\/revisions\/1107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}