After a break from Aubrey and Maturin for a few months--mostly to take care of some nonfiction reading and reviewing--I finally have time to dive back into the continuing story. I went into Book 8, The Ionian Mission, with a bit of fear, however. Why? Because the last time I tried to read through...
Jack Aubrey is such a dunderhead. He really should not be allowed abroad on land without a keeper.At sea, he is authoritative, knowledgable, decisive, charismatic, a man of action that other men delight in following. He is "Lucky Jack."But on land, he is decidedly unlucky. He is "Dunderhead Jack,...
"John Byron und sein Freund Tobias Barrow gehen 1740 an Bord der „HMS Wager“, einem Schiff 6.Klasse in der Flottille von Kommodore Anson. Byron ist Midshipman und Barrow der Gehilfe des Schiffsarztes. Der Auftrag des Kommodores lautet, an der Westküste Südamerikas die spanischen Bewegungen und di...
This is part 2 of 22 in the Aubrey/Maturin series and Patrick O'Brian, despite his eloquent, colorful timepiece language, could do so much more for the series if he wrote more lengthy passages about naval maneuvers and fighting action in Post Captain. Instead he spent well over 450 pages maturin...
After several years of returning to this series periodically, I'm now in the home stretch of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin tales. This is the sixteenth entry and the quality has not declined at all. In fact, The Wine-Dark Sea was one of the more interesting reads in this latter part of the lon...
This is one of my favorites, which partially brings an arc to a close. These arcs are intersecting, which is one of the brilliant aspects of Patrick O'Brian's roman fleuve. But there is a sense of closure in this one, which (in a reread) marks a milestone.Structurally, it is remarkable in a numbe...
The beginning presents a Jack who is all at sea ashore - playing cards with apparently respectable people but card sharps nevertheless and also unsuspectingly investing in a mining project. Sophie, privately concerned over all this, cleverly convinces him to assume command of the Leopard. Quite a...
Glad I bought the next two, because this doesn't end at the end. Scads of good fun, as always. Probably the most memorable part of this adventure was Stephen's trip to the Buddhist temple, where men and beasts live together in harmony and Stephen basically gets to have the on-shore naturalizing...
Let us beat to quarters and join Jack and Stephen on the H.M.S. "Surprise," a Royal Navy frigate during the Napoleonic Wars. Captain Jack Aubrey transports an ambassador to The Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), while Stephen stops at remote locations along the 30,000 mile journey to conduct scientif...
Two years ago, I started reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series after years of prodding by my husband who insisted that the books weren't really war adventures - which I would hate - but were more about the relationships of the men on the ships. Finally succumbing to his persuasion, I fo...
Treason's Harbour continues the Mediterranean cruise that Aubrey and Maturin began in the previous volume. It also extends the bittersweet tone of that book, as Jack and Stephen age, mature, and reflect on their lives and their futures. Jack's luck is still not back to its early heights, though t...
How much do I love these books? Let me count the ways...so far, we're up to six. Six splendiferous volumes of early 19th century seafaring goodness! By the sixth of this series of twenty, I was fully enamored of the characters, the story, the writing - the whole kit and kaboodle! Although I've be...
In the last volume of the wonderful Maturin/Aubrey series, Jack had been court-martialed for what appeared to be his complicity in a stock market fraud. Being a naïve landlubber, he had no idea of what he was being fraudulently involved in, thought he was just helping someone out and making a kil...
I'm cruising through the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin series which comprise a mighty set of enjoyable, well-researched yarns set at sea during the Napoleonic wars early in the nineteenth century. The connecting thread is the career of a John-Bull archetype, Captain Jack Aubrey, in the company ...
Patrick O’Brian confessed to having written The Golden Ocean in about six weeks, laughing aloud for much of the time. The book took me a great deal less than six weeks to read, but, like O’Brian, I found myself laughing, not because the story and general content is inherently funny – much of it i...
Many readers have noted that O'Brian's series declines in quality generally at some point in the second ten books. I agree with that, but The Hundred Days is the first volume where I actually almost wished he'd ended the series earlier. The reason for this is mostly in the opening chapter. The cl...
This 65-page fragment of a novel is only rewarding to fans of the series who want to say goodbye to one of the greatest fictional friendships in literature. We get to experience one last time the special bonds between British naval commander Jack Aubrey and his ship's doctor Stephen Maturin, wh...
The "Surprise" is on a secret mission to South America, helping Chileans gain their independence. Nothing goes simply in a Patrick O'Brian novel, and the passage to Chile is fraught with delays. After arriving, Maturin needs to navigate among the various juntas vying for dominance, and he has an ...
Another great entry in the Aubrey/Maturin series. This would ideally be read by someone who's read the seventeen previous instalments. You wouldn't have any difficulty following what's going on, but I think the author is playing to his regular audience here. Action scenes that once would have bee...
Apparently this is PO'B's first novel and, while I don't know if it's true, it is certainly believable. Which is not to say that it's a bad book, just that it lacks a lot of the polish and finesse of his later novels. Instead it reads a lot like an exercise in characterisation, voice and narrativ...
SUMMARY: At the end of O'Brian's Thirteen Gun Salute, Captain Aubrey and the crew of the Diane are shipwrecked by a typhoon on a remote island in the Dutch East Indies. After they are rescued, Aubrey and crew continue their interrupted mission aboard a new vessel, the Nutmeg. The fourteenth novel...
Tre donne e tre racconti diversi. Tre riflessioni sulla propria condizione coniugale e familiare. de Beauvoir, attraverso uno stile egregio, cattura ed espone il climax crescente di ansie e preoccupazioni delle tre protagoniste. La prima storia è stata quella che mi ha colpito di più. Alla confe...
Patrick O'Brian seemed to get better as a writer as this series wound down toward its end. This entry, number seventeen in the series, has actually been my favorite so far. Possibly that is because much of the action takes place on land and I didn't have to worry about keeping track of naval batt...
I read this book having spent some time in and around Collioure (which is where Patrick O'Brian lived) and along the Mediterranean coastal edge of the Pyrénées between France and Spain—so, where the story is set. And what attracted me to it initially was an interest in the identity of the place, ...
“Good morning, Stephen,” said Jack as his friend walked into the cabin. “Good morning to you, my dear,” said Stephen. “You have done your writing, I see?” “So I have too: a simple harsh direction that Brigid shall be delivere...
'I do so loathe plunging into the accumulated filth of two, no, three days and nights. Ain't you coming?' 'With your leave I shall attend to the anatomy of this noble fish—Mr Martin, how do you do?—before the slightest change sets in.' 'You can't have the deck above half an hour, Doctor,' s...
Even an uncommonly warm and industrious imagination could scarcely produce the frail shape of Commodore Nelson leaping from his battered seventy-four-gun Captain through the quarter-gallery window of the eighty-gun San Nicolas, taking her, and hurrying on across her deck to board the towering San...