soph (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophia_sol) wrote2019-10-14 08:55 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2019-10-14 08:55 pm
Master and Commander, by Patrick O'Brian
People who've been following me for a long time may or may not remember that years ago I was working on making my way through the whole Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. For those unfamiliar: this is a series of 20ish* books following the adventures of a naval captain named Jack Aubrey and his close friend Stephen Maturin, a naturalist and physician who travels with him as ship's surgeon, during the Napoleonic Wars.
I got stuck in my read-through FIVE YEARS AGO because the book I was halfway into (#11) was too stressful to read, and I just........kept on not being able to finish reading it. So finally I was like, you know what, I miss these books, I'm just gonna reread the first one instead.
And gosh, I'd forgotten JUST HOW MUCH I adore Patrick O'Brian's writing. This man is one of my absolute favourite authors and I don't know how he does it, he just writes in a way that is perfectly suited to my tastes: he's funny, and interesting, and has a deft hand for how to create (or defuse) tension, and can bring wonderful characters to life in moments, and is a master hand at implying things for the reader to infer (the whole business with getting that replacement spar in this book! amazing!), and has perfect pacing with which he subtly lays out his jokes, and so much more, I just love these books so much. And it's amazing to see how brilliant O'Brian already was in the very first book of this series.
It felt strange to be back at the beginning of the series again, with Jack Aubrey a young man just recently promoted to his first ever command of a ship, and once again seeing Aubrey and Maturin's hilarious opposite-of-a-meet-cute at the beginning. So much has happened between book 1 and book 11!
I can't say that reading this book was un-stressful though. Unlike when I first read it, I have a deep and longstanding love for the characters involved and so my concerns about what's going to happen to them over the course of the book are that much more intense. Even though I know things more or less work out for the characters in the long run, seeing them go through negative experiences (or anticipating seeing them go through such) is HARD! So I had to do a perhaps-unreasonable amount of pausing the reread for a few days here and there to gain the strength to continue. Not exactly the easy escape from being stuck halfway through #11 I was expecting, whoops. But I got through it in the end and I still adore this book and this series and these characters and everything. WHAT A GOOD.
*the "ish" is because the 21st book was unfinished at the time of the author's death but was published anyways in that incomplete state
I got stuck in my read-through FIVE YEARS AGO because the book I was halfway into (#11) was too stressful to read, and I just........kept on not being able to finish reading it. So finally I was like, you know what, I miss these books, I'm just gonna reread the first one instead.
And gosh, I'd forgotten JUST HOW MUCH I adore Patrick O'Brian's writing. This man is one of my absolute favourite authors and I don't know how he does it, he just writes in a way that is perfectly suited to my tastes: he's funny, and interesting, and has a deft hand for how to create (or defuse) tension, and can bring wonderful characters to life in moments, and is a master hand at implying things for the reader to infer (the whole business with getting that replacement spar in this book! amazing!), and has perfect pacing with which he subtly lays out his jokes, and so much more, I just love these books so much. And it's amazing to see how brilliant O'Brian already was in the very first book of this series.
It felt strange to be back at the beginning of the series again, with Jack Aubrey a young man just recently promoted to his first ever command of a ship, and once again seeing Aubrey and Maturin's hilarious opposite-of-a-meet-cute at the beginning. So much has happened between book 1 and book 11!
I can't say that reading this book was un-stressful though. Unlike when I first read it, I have a deep and longstanding love for the characters involved and so my concerns about what's going to happen to them over the course of the book are that much more intense. Even though I know things more or less work out for the characters in the long run, seeing them go through negative experiences (or anticipating seeing them go through such) is HARD! So I had to do a perhaps-unreasonable amount of pausing the reread for a few days here and there to gain the strength to continue. Not exactly the easy escape from being stuck halfway through #11 I was expecting, whoops. But I got through it in the end and I still adore this book and this series and these characters and everything. WHAT A GOOD.
*the "ish" is because the 21st book was unfinished at the time of the author's death but was published anyways in that incomplete state