I know this will be overshadowed by the passing of Carrie Fisher, but the man who wrote Watership Down (among other books) has diedat age 96.
He was 52 when he started writing, so that still gives me hope! I read* Watership Down* in high school, then read it again without the overhanging What Will the Teacher Test Us On and enjoyed it so much more.
Watership Down is on my nightstand. I started reading it a few months ago, but didn’t finish it (this time - I’ve read it several times before.) 96 years is a good run!
So many great books, so many hours I spent reading them…
RIP Mr. Adams.
Wow. I did not realize he had been alive until this month. I read “Shardik,” “The Plague Dogs” and “The Girl on the Swing” as well as “Watership Down” in the 1970s and 80s so I think of him as being from that era, and not as lasting until now.
Watership Down and it’s successor are two books I always recommend people to read.
Love them even now.
The primroses were over.
Loved his work. Way back in the day, I ran Watershipdown-dot-org which was likely primarily used by school students looking to avoid reading the book but hopefully I helped some people out there appreciate it a little more. Sad to hear of his passing but at least it sounds as though he died with the love of not only his fans, but also three generations of family.
This is so cool! How and what made you start it?
I had the usual experience of being horrified by the film as a youngster then I decided to read the novel last year. Loved it. There’s a lot of humour in there that doesn’t come across in the film at all.
Oh, I read the novel in college at a friend’s recommendation and fell in love with it. Made a website with character info, Lapine glossary, comparisons and contrasts between the warrens, etc. And some sillier stuff like a botanical description of each of the rabbit’s names – well, those named after plants which was most of them, in case you wanted to know what a Speedwell was. When I left school and my account, I bought the .org domain and migrated it over there. Had a forum which was used by a few die-hards (although, realistically, there’s only so many ways to ask “Who’s your favorite character?”) and even an email host. Eventually other obligations came first and I let it drop. For a while another fan picked up the domain and hosted it on his dime but I think he eventually let it go as well. This was all back in the mid 90s through the early 2000s.
It was never official, of course. I think I tried for the .com address but it got picked up by the BBC for their short-lived cartoon series.
When I read the book in high school I didn’t realize how much of the rabbit language I had absorbed. I gasped when Bigwig tells Blackavar, “Silflay hraka, u embleer rah” because I realized I knew what he meant.
Eat shit, you stinking prince.
Jophiel, it looks like the site is still there, just with a disclaimer.
You can see the best HTML the 90’s had to offer, back when Frames still seemed like a pretty kickass idea 
The chapters start with quotes from other works, and some were in French, without translation. I took French so I could read them.
I liked his idea of the Logosphere, as I recall him calling it, which flows over the earth like the atmosphere, and out of which stories are pulled.
Rest in peace, Mr Adams, you had a good run.
When I was five, Dad would read us a bedtime story if we were in bed by nine o’clock. The first one was Watership Down. My heart has joined The Thousand, for my friend has stopped running today. Embleer Frith!
I loved his world building and how he made the world of rabbits simultaneously familiar and completely alien. Also Shardik. (The one about Robert E. Lee’s horse is skippable for those interested, but the further tales of Watership Down is a worthy companion to the first.)
And I still sometimes say a prayer to El-Arairah.
From Ogden Nash:
*People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when…
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies. *
RIP, Old Man.
Awesome, I’m going to use that the next time I chase a rabbit out of the garden. Yes, I’ve become Mr. McGregor.
Richard Adams said WD was not an allegory – just a story about rabbits. Still, the part about imminent destruction of one’s home and short-sighted, militaristic leaders insisting there’s no problem, well, it sort of resonates right now.
RIP Mr. Adams. I love Watership Down and have read it several times. As a young reader, it really made me think more deeply about life, death, friendship, war…
FYI, there is a new series adaptation coming soon.
Conversely, I remember liking Traveller and having little use for Tales from Watership Down at all.
But, hey, we all found what we liked 
Never read Traveller. I was super-psyched about Tales from Watership Down when it came out, and remember it as one of my great literary disappointments: not a single tale in it held a candle to the El-Ahrairah stories from the original novel. The original stories still serve as an inspiration to me, and I still tell those stories to my own children.
Sampiro, thank you for that poem.
It’s a shame he’s going to be the Farrah Fawcett of 2016.