I have a confession to make. Even though, I am big fan of historical fiction, it took the watching the movie version of Master & Commander to motivate me into reading Patrick O'Brian.
I use to see his books in the bookstores all the time and I admit to being intrigued in a kind of 'Britannia rules the Waves' kind of way but I hadn't succumbed because the book covers looked far too promising. I was afraid of being disappointed… I have been badly burned by spectacularly well-designed book covers before. So much so that my personal rule became the uglier/plainer the book cover the better the book.
It took falling in love with the Master & Commander movie before I felt O'Brian might have serious potential to live up to being one of the few exceptions to my rule. Hollywood usually manages to mangle the best of stories and so for a film to remain this strong after the celluloid treatment it had to possess real literary meat.
Me, being me, decided to plunge right in and buy the first three books before I had even read the first book. The first book was a little on the dry side – much like toast is without butter and having been left lying on the counter for days. Actually, I found it so much like dry toast that I shelved the other two books indefinitely. Yesterday, I came home early from work due to illness and was desperate to find something to curl up with and read between the bends. Post Captain (book #2) was the closest book. I am now on page 420 of 473 pages and I would have been done if things like sleep, going to work and children didn't get in my way.
2 comments:
Well then here's my confession. I have yet to read a single one of the Aubrey-Maturin novels. They came very highly recommended, I've had have electronic copies of the whole series for about 304 years, but never got started on any of them.
A fellow Red Ensigner said they were better than Forrester's novels. Hopefully one day I'll find out whether that's true. =)
Who'd have thought that neither of us would have read the Aubrey-Maturin books? And here I thought I was the last in the western hemisphere to not read Aubrey-Maturin.
Well, I loved Forrester, and have did from the get-go...but I really have had to warm-up to Aubrey-Maturin...though I am not sure I would necessarily pass them on to son who usually loves to read this kind of thing...the first book is painfully slow but Post Captain wasn't bad at all
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