Yes, that was the joke.

*headTARDIS*

Watership Down was an 8th-grade Language Arts class requirement that I enjoyed after getting past page 58. I remember that page number because it took me six full days to get to page 59--it was like there was a mountain range on page 58 that I had to scale to move past it. Once I did, I finished the rest of the book in a day or two.

It was ninth grade English for me, and I was always way ahead of whatever the required reading was. My shining moment was coming in one day and randomly chatting with some classmates and deciding to memorize the names of all the bunnies, just for kicks.

Which turned out to be the bonus question on the quiz.

Most revelatory reading moment--the moment when Dernhelm rips off "his" helmet and cries, "I am no man! You face a woman!" and the Witch King hesitates . . . see, I didn't get that it was Eowyn. I had no clue until that very moment. I was young, and I trusted authors completely. I remember sitting bolt upright from where I was laying and reading, staring at the page as the hair on my arms stood upright.

The biggest physical reaction I ever had to a book was reading The World According to Garp when I was in high school. The bell rang and I was reading it in the hallway as I walked to my next class and I got to "I mith him" and I got light headed and almost passed out.

Shirley Jackson Reading Memory: Finding a cool used paperback copy of We Have Always Lived In The Castle when JZ and I were honeymooning in New Orleans, and reading it on the balcony of our B&B while drinking gin and tonics.

I think I read Watership Down in 5th grade for some reason. I just loved it. But then we read it for 8th grade English and had an awful teacher, and so everyone hated it because of her, and thought I was crazy when I kept saying, "No, it's good, I swear!" and plus she never wanted to talk about the parts I was interested in.

Er. Not that I'm bitter.

plus she never wanted to talk about the parts I was interested in.

You can talk about them now. So what was it? An unhealthy fascination with Fiver?

I've never read Watership Down. I wonder if I'd appreciated it now.

I think I read Watership Down in 5th grade for some reason. I just loved it. But then we read it for 8th grade English and had an awful teacher, and so everyone hated it because of her, and thought I was crazy when I kept saying, "No, it's good, I swear!"

Yeah, Watership Down had been one of my favorite books for years before we ever read it in school, so I was thrilled when it turned up on the reading list, and then nobody else liked it. The teacher was fine, but we'd just read Catcher in the Rye, and I think people were suffering from whiplash.

It always boggles my mind when someone dislikes Watership Down. I t shouldn't , I worked with enough people that prefer realistic fiction, but I am still always amazed.

I never read Watership Down, either. And I think I only started A Wrinkle in Time (which I love now). This may be why I don't read a lot of fantasy or sci-fi.

Oh, no, it's stuff that I wanted to talk about because at the time, it was exciting to recognize literary devices All By Myself. Like, the El-Ahrairah stories paralleling the action, and what the epigraphs referred to, and so on.

An unhealthy fascination with Fiver?

Tch. It's all about Thlayli.

I'm beginning to think I was too young when I read...well, anything. We Have Always Lived in the Castle I read when I was 12, and that was one of those books that put me in a completely other headspace for days. Like I was convinced I'd poisoned my parents.

I was 11 maybe when I read Lord of the Rings, so no shiver at the Dernhelm reveal - I just was like, well duh it's Eowyn and duh she's going to kick his ass.

Back another year to 10, and Watership Down and I cried and cried and named my stuffed rabbit that I slept with Fiver and totally did NOT get the Christian metaphor.

Which was okay, because I didn't get it in Narnia either until I reread them in college. I'd picked them up after loving LOTR, randomly, seeing a cover with a dude with a sword on it, and was pretty "eh" about them. Loved them much more later.

And I was WAY too young for Lord of the Flies and Catch-22, but those did teach me to not go whining to my English teacher parents that I had nothing to read.

Although, when I read Amityville Horror later, I had a retroactive A-HA! about the pig and flies and stuff in LofF.