Watership Down Redux

I think I’m gonna re-read Watership Down, starting August 1. Give it the re-read-while-listening-to-the-audio-CD-book treatment. Should take me the entire month, I would think.

Watership Down was one of the handful of books I read as a kid that overwhelmed me. I read it the first time right around the time the animated movie came out; I don’t recall whether I read it or watched it first. But I remember this – it was probably the first true adult novel I read. Yeah, I had read a bunch of Asimovs and Heinleins and Bradburys up to that point, but this was different, and I knew it was different as I was reading it.

This was the first book I recognized to be written on multiple levels. Sure, there was the adventure story of the rabbits trying to find a new warren. Much like Homer’s Odyssey, which was on the periphery of my consciousness at that time (a lot of Greek mythology in grade school). But there was also the whole lepusian mythos: Frith, El-ahrairah, and the quasi-biblical narratives linking the two. And my much younger self could somewhat vaguely slightly puzzle out the geopolitical analogs in the tale: Efrafa as Soviet Russia, Cowslip’s warren as a society appeasing evil/death (Chamberlain England?). I struggled with the whole thing, and enjoyed it fantastically.

I read it that first summer – must’ve been in middle school, between seventh and eighth grades. Fond memories reading it in the backyard blades of grass in the bright sun. Lugging the heavy tome around with me on my bike here and there. Pondering the helpful glossary of rabbit terms at the back of the book. Loved it. Read it again a few years later, though of this second time I can’t recall any details. Was it in high school? College? Just after college? Not sure.

Remember picking it up at a mall sometime in the late 80s – the Stupid Me phase. Leather jacket, cigarettes, gleeful beer drinking. I forgot the book on the counter of a convenience store buying a pack of Marlboros.

So … in thirteen days I’ll crack it again, first time in perhaps 30 years.

Should be awesome!