Randall Rereads Redwall

Randall Munroe at the xkcd cartoon looks back at the Redwall series:


I didn't read Redwall until I was an adult, so I don't have youthful memories to reconsider. Brian Jacques's storytelling style in Castaways of the Flying Dutchman made me reconsider something else: my belief that the only rule that successful fiction writers absolutely have to follow is, "Show, don't tell." In that book Jacques both showed and told everything with the subtlety of a pair of sledgehammers approaching one's head from either side, and I stopped listening.