Watership Down

Watership Down, by Richard Adams

I seldom re-read a book. There are still fewer books that I enjoyed as a teenager, yet still enjoy as an adult. Watership Down is one of those few. Written in 1972 by Richard Adams, this tale about a group of rabbits searching for a new home in the English countryside can rightly be considered a modern classic. It has been made into a feature film, a short lived animated television series, and an anthology of short stories based around the same characters.

I normally dislike books about animals, but in Watership Down Adams transcends the genre by doing what all great authors do --he makes the reader care about the characters and their dilemma passionately. The fact that the characters in this case are rabbits makes his artistry all the more amazing. While the book weighs in at a hefty 426 pages, Adams does not waste words. Everything contributes towards creating a credible, multi-layered physical, emotional, linguistic, and mythical world through which the rabbits live and move and have their being.

Others have compared Watership Down to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and I think it's a very apt comparison. Both authors create fantastic worlds that seem vividly real to the reader. Both contain a strong sense of the struggle between good and evil. Both worlds contain a fair share of violence. Additionally, I consider the universe created by Richard Adams in this novel as "Middle Earth in microcosm." While Tolkien's fantasy landscape spanned thousands of leagues, Adams' setting is a real English countryside spanning only a few miles. A map near the beginning of the novel shows the rabbits' entire world comprising only a ten mile by six mile square.

Imagine life as a rabbit. The sun shines overhead as you feed on the sweet grass of the meadow. Yet there is a rigid social hierarchy in the burrow you share with your fellow rabbits. Population pressure, and a sense of impending doom encourage you to leave, but you're small, defenseless, and a thousand different species hunt you as prey. How would you cope with such a situation? What stories would you tell to make sense of the world you live in? What comforts would you seek, and what solutions would you find? Adams answers these questions poetically through this novel, and one can't help but draw parallels with the human condition.

I found two things especially compelling about the social world inhabited by the rabbits. First, it's remarkably similar to our own. Secondly, it's under-girded by a spirituality that explains life and gives it meaning. While the myths and the meanings are not exactly like the ones humans have found, they are nonetheless credible and satisfying. The rabbits tell each other sacred stories as they travel and struggle, providing variety to the novel and deepening our understanding of the rabbit's worldview. The infusion of spiritual meaning helps the reader identify with the rabbits on yet another level.

PUBLISHER: Maximillan Publishing Co., Inc; New York; 1972; ISBN: 0-02-700030-3

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by J.K. Rowling

I read J.K. Rowling's fifth Harry Potter book wondering how she would be able to keep my interest again. After all, the basic outline of the story always seems to be the same. Harry is miserable at the Dursleys. Harry gets spirited away to Hogwarts. Harry struggles against Snape, Malfoy, and difficult class assignments. Somehow Gryffindor wins the Quidditch cup. (Have they ever lost the cup? Don't the other houses ever get depressed about this?) Somewhere Voldemort enters the picture, Harry fights him, and the school year ends triumphantly.

While Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix does follow this basic structure, Rowling has taken her development of the characters to new levels of sophistication. Harry is fifteen years old now, and as a boy in his mid-teens he struggles with issues of identity, love, and family in this novel. For the first time I can recall in a Harry Potter novel, we're left at the end with our hero seriously questioning himself. If Harry has seemed like a superhero (or at least like a somewhat arrogant, know-it-all teenager) in previous installments, this time Harry makes some real mistakes, and will have to grapple with the consequences of those actions (hopefully in future books.)

This new depth and sophistication is not just limited to Harry. In Order of the Phoenix we learn more about the imperfections of many of the major characters. We read Dumbledore candidly recounting the mistakes he's made with Harry. We finally learn why Snape hates Harry so much. We learn more about Harry's parents, and about Sirius Black.

While I was reading this novel, I also stumbled across an essay on-line called "Steal this Essay" I was very intrigued by the points this author makes in his blog, especially in light of Harry Potter. I did a quick search on the file-sharing networks, and found that all five of the Harry Potter novels are available for download. I searched mere days after the novel's release, and there it was, free for the taking.

While the Harry Potter novels have made J.K. Rowling richer than the queen of England herself, I couldn't help but wonder what the future of intellectual property is when anyone who wants a copy can have one. There are still some technical hurdles to be overcome before novelists really have something to fear. People still don't want to be chained to their computers to read a book, even if they don't have to pay for it. PDAs have not become ubiquitous enough to pose a threat either. But the day does seem to be coming when either electronic content and online behavior will need to be monitored by a police state at unprecedented levels, or a new revenue model for all the intellectual property industries will need to be devised --one that ensure the author compensation while minimizing the incentives to copy.

KEYWORDS: Fantasy, children, series, magic, intellectual property
PUBLISHER: Scholastic; (June 21, 2003); ISBN: 043935806X

The Complete Gnomes

The Complete Gnomes, by Wil Nuygen (text) and Rien Poortvliet (illustrations)

I've loved gnomes for as long as I can remember. It's all because my Auntie had a book on her coffee table called Gnomes (1977) when I was a child. My family would visit her and I'd make a bee-line for the gnome book. Richly illustrated, it was packed full of details about these little creatures --enough for a youth's imagination to bring them to life.

As an adult, I'd sometimes reminisce about the gnome book. I'd look for it in bookstores, but could never find anything like it. So one year my spouse did some sleuthing, and got me The Complete Gnomes (1994), an unabridged compilation of both Gnomes and a later release by Nuygen and Poortvliet, Secrets of the Gnomes (1987), which I never even knew existed. This second section goes beyond a mere compendium of gnome facts and lore, taking the reader into the daily life of some gnomes and the authors as they share some small-scale adventures.

PUBLISHER: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.; ISBN: 0810931958; (October 1994)