Not-so-recent reads

Traveller, by Richard Adams. The Civil War, as seen and reported by Robert E. Lee's famous horse.

Adams is best known for his collection of stories written from the viewpoints of various kinds of animals. Traveller is as successful as any of these, although it doesn't contain as much of Adams' implied criticism of human society and its practices as books like Watership Down and The Plague Dogs. The horse's good-ole-boy cornpone voice, and his total ignorance of much of the context of what's going on around him, become annoying from time to time, although I suppose they can be read as a parallel to the kind of strategic ignorance that characterizes many individual soldiers' knowledge of the war. I enjoyed the book nonetheless.