Hacker News Books

Such a wonderful book, I read it every single year for about twenty years, until I misplaced my copy. There's a beautiful walk that takes one by Watership Down and Nuthanger Farm. Recommended: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2009/jun/07/watership-dow...

Moominpappa at Sea is somewhat similar to Watership Down where they are children books but themes are very deep. For Pipi it is kind silly adult point of view but generally chilren some weird reason loves it, nowdays my 4-yeard old dresses like pipi several times a week.

Watership Down is a great book, but I am having trouble corroborating a Newbery Medal or Honor?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watership_Down#Awards

http://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/newberymedal/...

If you like Watership Down I don't think I can recommend enough H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. While the books are very different, one is a novel the other is a memoir they both touch on nature, death, life in beautifully similar ways.

I really enjoyed recently reading Snow Crash. Watership Down was great back in the day

Oh you're right, well guess I'm getting too old to remember my elementary school days :). That Newbery list was pretty much where I got all of my memorable reading at that age, including Rats of NIMH and the High King (aka the Black Cauldron series), so I must have conflated it with Watership Down. Seems more likely that I liked NIMH enough that a librarian recommended Watership Down.

Everything by Asimov and Heinlein and the Dune series by Herbert.
Also "Watership Down"

I read Watership Down when I was 14 or 15. It was assigned reading for school, and I was pissed. What 14 yo wants to read about rabbits!

Then I read it. And then went and read every single Richard Adams book I could get.

> Watership Down was the first book of its size that I read and it had a profound effect on me that has significantly directed my life.

It's on a fairly short list of books I've read more than twice, along with LotR, Dune and Hitch Hiker's Guide. There may be others I've forgotten but those four really stand out.

Intersting idea...I had an Amazon package stolen off my porch this week, the thief opened it and saw it was the novel Watership Down, then threw it back on my porch. Stolen packages are a way of life in my neighborhood.

94. Watership Down – Richard Adams

>No novel is allowed to lollygag around the point its trying to achieve in the way these articles flagrantly waste your time.

With barely less than a second's though: Watership Down, a hugely popular novel in the 1970s, spends untold amounts of text/paper immersed in detailed descriptions of the flora that the characters are moving through or eating.

Why not just say "I don't enjoy this style of writing", rather than trying to come up with some supposedly objective metrics for how other people should write?

My introduction to Watership Down was in the Paideia, the book of word lists that the National Spelling Bee used to distribute as study material before bee season. The word lists were occasionally themed around specific books and for awhile they had a Watership Down list. Here are a few of the awesome words I learned from that list (which eventually led me to read and enjoy Mr. Adams' book):

stridulate (what a cricket does when it chirps)

susurration (murmuring, like grass in the wind)

tormentil (an astringent plant)

myxomatosis (a viral infection in rabbits!)

They don't write 'em like that anymore. RIP Mr. Adams.

Watership Down is a great story but also Richard Adams publishing it was a story of perseverance. It was rejected by multiple publishers back when publishers were big gatekeepers.[1]

Watership Down published by Rex Collings after being rejected by seven other publishers. Becomes Adams' best-known work selling more than 50 million copies worldwide. He wins the prestigious Carnegie Medal

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/richard-ad...