Writing II Blog Post 1

The book I am currently reading is called "The Plague Dogs" by Richard Adams, who also wrote two other books I have read, "Watership Down" and "Tales from Watership Down". The basic premise of this story is two dogs, Rowf and Snitter, escape from an animal testing facility and must try to find a new home. I have read about 120 pages of this book and I do enjoy it very much so far. My only complaint is that Snitter, the victim of some brain surgery experiment, talks way too much nonsense in the story that it is difficult to follow what he is trying to say. That aside though, this book combines two of my favorite styles of fiction, Adventure/Questing and animal personification. I always enjoy a good adventure novel but more importantly, my favorite type of fiction books (besides apocalypse stories) are ones that have animals as protagonists. Some of my favorite writers who have done this include Erin Hunter ("Warriors"), Jack London ("Into the Wild" and "Whitefang"), and Brian Jacques ("Redwall"). For whatever reason I think animals make better characters than people. Speaking of which I really ought to reread some of the "Warriors" books, I haven't read any in years and they were some awesome books about bad-ass cats fighting each other. Anyways so far this book is pretty good, but I'm expecting the pace to pick up soon because it has gotten somewhat slow. The weird thing about Adams as a writer is that he doesn't seem to have a consistent style from book to book. "Watership Down" was definitely his best work, with a smooth flow to his writing and good consistency between characters. In "Tales from Watership Down", written 20 years later as a string of short stories concerning the same characters from the first book, I was shocked at how different and inconsistent everything was. Characters behaved differently, talked differently, and the writing altogether seemed different and less thought out. I still enjoyed the stories but was a bit disappointed by the decline in effort. "the Plague Dogs" seems to be reasonable in terms of perceived effort, but it just doesn't seem like the same author wrote it. I'm not sure what the deal with Adams style is, but it's not too big of a deal, it just bothers me for some reason. Either way, so far this book has been a solid read. I always wanted to try writing one of these animal protagonist books just for fun, but it's actually much harder than it seems. The most difficult part I would say, and something Adams does incredibly well, is to explain the world from the point of view of the animal, and expressing how they might perceive things that are normal to humans, such as cars, weather, cities and so on. Despite the inconsistencies in his writing, I have enjoyed all the work of Adams and "The Plague Dogs" only reaffirms this.