Subject: Two novels. (So daring. Well, not compared to Key . . .)
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Posted on: 2017-02-20 03:55:00 UTC

As anyone in the lounge or on the wiki already knows, I just finished Watership Down by Richard Adams recently. It was rather better than I was expecting. I've never seen the movie, but I didn't find the violence to be too overwrought in the text. Then again, I am a zookeeper, and am used to seeing animal violence regularly, so not sure if that would bother other folks. Either way, I found the characterization of the individual rabbits and their collective culture to a very believable representation of how a prey species might behave, which importantly helped keep the story from feeling dated, despite its age. It was a fairly quick read, too, so I definitely recommend it to anyone who can stomach tooth-and-nail rabbit battles.

I'm still in the middle of Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One. I'm not very far yet, but I had to watch the movie version for Senior Synthesis back in high school, so I already know most of the major points. It's a long, sprawling story about a little British boy growing up in South Africa right at the start of World War II, his experience shaped by dealing with nationalism-based hatred from the Nazi-sympathetic Boers (local white people) while also observing how native black people are treated by both. It's a good theme, obviously, but I have to warn for not just vulgar language, but extremely frequent use of the k-word. I also don't know if any sex scenes are coming up later, since I'm only up to Peekay being eleven years old. (I don't recall any from the movie, but the movie cut stuff from the book, and I may just have forgotten any that were.)

—doctorlit is aiming for a biography on Saint Ignatius next; he likes to mix things up with a teeny dose of non-fiction, ever-so-rarely

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