Books, Reviewed

I recently finished reading Watership Down by Richard Adams. It was selected from a stack of books I was interested in but no one jumped out to me. Process of elimination and spousal input eventually narrowed the field to this novel. And I am quite happy that it did. For those, like me, who do not know what Watership Down is about, it followed a group of rabbits who decide to leave their warren (home) to find a new place to live that one of the rabbits saw in a vision. I know, it sounds strange, but it is really good! I explained it to Aaron as something of The Once and Future King, where Merlins turns Wart into various animals so he can learn about different societies. There is something of this in Watership Down, as the rabbits encounter different warrens along the way, each of which take something important to rabbits, like safety from predators, and skew it just enough so they lose something of their rabbit-ness. Another book I used to compare it to with Aaron was The Lord of the Rings, only in that it is an adventure story with dangers and strange lands. This is a book someone could read to their child, read as a teen, and again as an adult, and enjoy it at each stage. 

The other recent read that was a true surprise was one I picked from my Penguin Classics, which I now have the complete collection of - yay! The book was one of only a couple I had not heard of before, so it was high time I figured out what it was about. The book is Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell and, my goodness, is it a riot. This book is not a novel so much as a series of vignettes revolving around the lives of a group of older ladies in Cranford, a town with no men, as Gaskell writes. These women, widows or unmarried daughters of the town's "aristocracy" have, over their 60+ years, created an unwritten rule book of how long a  neighborly visit should last (15 minutes); that a dress in a fashion 30 years ago is acceptable, but the latest fashion in hat must be worn (at least they are led to believe they wear the latest hat trend); and that it may not be reasonable, but must not be spoken of, if one of the ladies decides to make a flannel jacket for her cow after it loses its hair. These ladies, in other words, are simply ridiculous, but they do it with the sweetest of intentions...mostly. It may take reading a sentence twice to understand the humor, but Gaskell ensures the pages are rife with subtle, and not so subtle, moments of delight. Aaron must have thought me mad with my random laughter throughout this book. If a gal wants to read something around Charles Dickens' time, with something like Jane Austen's more hilarious characters living next door to one another, this is an excellent book.