Now I must go re-read Watership Down. Bigwig, Fiver, Hazel, Hyzenthlay... Maybe Plague Dogs too, because the ending satisfies my mushy heart, after it has given up all hope. Much like the emotional payoff in The Incredible Journey.
I remember having to sleep with the lights on after reading The Haunting of Hill House and how somehow the colors in the room looked all wrong and it was the most frightening thing ever.
I acquired the entire Anne of Green Gables series at the Curious Book Shoppe back in Michigan, and none of them had been published before 1936. I loved reading fragile, yellowing books much older than I because it made the story feel more like time travel. I've pretty much deleted Anne of Ingleside from my memory banks because the author was so clearly bored that my beloved vivacious Anne came across like a Valium-damaged housewife who couldn't finish a single thought.
I think one of my favorite book memories is coming across my roommate's copy of John Varley's Wizard. Standing in the living room, paused on my way to doing something else and getting so completely caught up in the story that I had to come up for air. Thinking, " oh wow" and "I have got to go get me a copy of this book ASAP because I can't steal this book and I can't wait for my turn at it."
When Eowyn kicked the Witch King's ass, how happy I would have been to know that characters like Xena and Buffy and Zoe would soon be routine.
Talking rabbits are cool.
Of course they are! Only crazyheads don't accept this as a Universal Truth.
(Which means I should probably re-read
Watership Down
soon-ish, because I haven't in about two decades.)
I haven't read it since my first time in ninth grade, and I want to read it again now.
I think I read that
Tales of Watership Down
thing years ago, but I don't remember. I at least held it.
Talking rabbits are cool.
Plus the animated film is a great way to traumatize kids (and probably a few adults as well).
Hi, here is a river of blood!
Oh, I just remembered "The Yellow Wallpaper". Pretty creepy when I read it, much more so when I thought about it while sick and prone to hallucinations and delusions myself.
Shudder.
Yellow Wallpaper is definitely a mindblower.
All this talk about Watership Down makes me also want to reread it (I haven't read it since that 8th grade class). I was just looking at its Wikipedia entry, and saw three interesting cultural references, among others:
On The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert keeps a copy on a bookshelf labeled "non-fiction".
In Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, when Gromit turns on the van's radio in one scene, the song "Bright Eyes" from the Watership Down movie is heard.
In the Stephen King novel titled The Stand, one of the main characters, Stu Redman, has read Watership Down and uses the book's concept of "going tharn", or freezing in catatonic panic, to describe how another character makes him feel as Stu tries to escape the Vermont plague facility holding him captive. Later, Stu says that another character, Harold Lauder reminds him of Silver, or Silverweed.
And, of course, it's one of the books Sawyer is passing the time with on LOST.
