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As for "Post Captain", O'Brian has stated that the "English countryside" portion of the novel is his homage to Jane Austen. Most of the rest of the series is, in general, much more nautically oriented...and even the periods which transpire on land are war-themed. From a personal perspective, I utterly love these books, even though it DID take me a little while to get into them. I can completely sympathize with the poster who said that it was initially a slog. M&C was definitely the hardest one, just from the difficulty of orienting myself to O'Brian's prose style. Once you get used to it, though, things open up dramatically. The first time I reread M&C I was amazed at how much nuance I had missed with my initial read, because I was concentrating so hard on understanding what was going on that the subtler stuff went right over my head. This is absolutely a series that rewards multiple readings. Oddly enough, I still think my favorite passage in the series is from M&C, when Jack and Stephen are talking about the harshness of hanging a man for buggery. First time that O'Brian made me literally burst out laughing. Master and Commander posted:His Majesty's Sloop Sophie
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Apr 26, 2011 21:03
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I'm in the midst of reading "Desolation Island" (book #5), and found these quite excellent diagrams for HMS Leopard. While the specifics may change from ship to ship, I'd imagine that the general layout remains fairly similar, so people can use these to orient themselves to the interior of the various ships in the books: Forecastle and Quarter Deck Upper Deck Lower Deck Orlop Deck
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May 1, 2011 18:14
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I will admit to being a bit flummoxed at the placement of the capstans, though. On both the upper and lower deck, the support posts are in the way of turning the capstans with the bars shipped...and perhaps they put a hatch over the upper deck companionway just forward of the capstan, or else you'd have a lot of disappearing sailors. (for that matter, is it just me, or does that companionway seem to not actually arrive at the lower deck?)
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May 1, 2011 19:57
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Raskolnikov2089 posted:That book is my absolute favorite in the series, all because of 2 pages. You'll know them when you come to them. Smashurbanipal posted:The very end of the book when the crowd of Navy men shows up to cheer for him while he's placed in stocks? That part legitimately gave me a big lump in my throat. Such a great moment.
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May 17, 2011 00:58
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I think it's sortof implied that, basically, DV is more flirtatious and, well, for lack of a better term, more potentially willing to put out. Sophie's about as likely to cheat on Jack as the moon is to fall on your shoe, but Diana is, well, a fast woman. At least until Diana and Clarissa explain (it all) to Sophie that she needs a good deep-dicking while that horndog, adultering jerk Jack is away!  I think it's hilarious that Dan Savage's "sometimes cheating can save a marriage" concept is in full force in these historical novels...
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May 19, 2011 17:41
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Decius posted:At least they explain to her that sex doesn't have to be something that a women has to endure instead of enjoy if done right. Apparently Jack never has attended to her needs, which seems a bit surprising considering his apparently sexually healthy relationships that seemingly both parties enjoyed. But maybe he thought with his wife he should adhere to the Bible-induced missionary position and nothing else... Wow, that got creepy quickly. Yeah, but as I recall, Diana and Clarissa were actively encouraging her to have an affair with some Army officer while Jack was off at sea...
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May 20, 2011 20:01
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:With what result? Could you go into more detail as to how that particular scene played out? Every time I get to it I spend like half an hour online trying to research cricket rules to no avail. In cricket, you are supposed to use your bat to defend your wicket (i.e. the three stumps with loose crosspieces that sit behind the batter). As such, cricket tends to be a defensive game from the batsman's point of view, since you don't HAVE to run unless you so choose. (Imagine in baseball, if a batter could just stand at home plate and decline to run on a hit ball, until he got one he liked) You could literally have a cricket batsman standing up at the wicket for over a hundred pitches. What Stephen did, on the other hand, was treat it like hurling, which as someone has said, is an Irish field sport more akin to field hockey...instead of tamely defending the wicket, like expected, he charged the ball, scooped it up with his stick, and (not understanding that the point in cricket is to NOT have the ball hit the wickets when you're batting) then swatted the ball directly into a wicket, thinking it was a goal, thus causing his team to lose. (Also: I am a bloody Yank who has watched all of one cricket match, so if I made a mistake, please correct me...)
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May 24, 2011 01:27
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I'm reading "The Surgeon's Mate" now. I had totally forgotten that absolutely hysterical scene: When Jack, Stephen, and Jagiello are captured and transported to Paris by Duhamel...and Jack, Jagiello and Duhamel eat some bad crawfish along the way and are in poor shape by the time they arrive at the prison: "Their entrance into the grim ancient fortress was unlike any that Stephen had ever known. Duhamel had his door open before the carriage stopped, and followed by Jack and Jagiello, who trampled on Stephen and broke his larger bottle in their haste, he ran into the immense vaulted guard-room where those charged with receiving the prisoners sat among scaffolding and pails. With irresistible impetuosity they rushed past the deputy-governor, his secretary, the turnkeys and ran on, pale and earnest, down a dark corridor, Duhamel a good length ahead."
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Jun 2, 2011 19:37
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Benagain posted:There's a phrase that captures Jack perfectly and damned if I can remember it exactly. Something along the lines of "A man with a great appreciation of all humor, be it his own or other's." That's actually one of the things that I think Russell Crowe did best with his characterization of Aubrey in the movie. The "lesser of two weevils," scene was wonderful...he tries to hold a serious mien as he leads into it, but just loses all control as he gives the punchline and dissolves into helpless laughter. Exactly as I would imagine Aubrey to do so in the novels.
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Sep 12, 2011 19:42
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silly posted:Six Frigates is amazing. One of the best works of military history I've ever read. True dat. Six Frigates is excellent. On the subject of the RN, though, I also recommend this: To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World It's been a while since I read it, and I'm sure it's a bit thin on excruciating detail since, y'know, it's not three thousand pages long, but I remember it being pretty decent.
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Oct 27, 2011 04:14
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Huggybear posted:My father-in-law got me this (To Rule the Waves) for xmas a couple years ago, and it was a great read. Nice standing rigging cheat sheet! I found a neat page that has very clear cutaways of the (horrible old) HMS Leopard, and figure that from there, most other ships can be imagined with various degrees of accuracy. http://www.lorkaest.de/Leopard/LorKaest2/Leopard_1.html
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Dec 6, 2011 07:41
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Blog Free or Die posted:'Jack, you have debauched my sloth.' is one of the best things I've ever read. I've been rereading them over the last few weeks (started with The Letter of Marque, though, since that's when Jack's more free-wheeling adventures begin) and I laughed out loud when Babbington's cook uses a "Papin's digester" (a pressure cooker, I assume) to cook a pudding more rapidly, only to have it explode when the cook and his mates put a smoothing iron over the safety valve to make it cook faster.
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Jul 5, 2012 06:53
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While futzing around and looking up some terms I came across this, which was pretty cool: a working model of the HMS Victory's capstan. It's great for understanding what's going on when they raise the anchors, with their talk about "messenger lines", "nippers", "cathead", etc... http://nautarch.tamu.edu/model/report2/
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Jul 21, 2012 20:09
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I'm coming to the end of "The Hundred Days." Bonden. 
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Jul 24, 2012 08:17
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Just started rereading the series (for probably the fifth time). I always forget about the bees (NOT THE BEES) that Stephen brings aboard at the end of "Post Captain", when Jack gets his acting command on the Lively. Never fails to make me laugh, the rough, tough sailors losing their poo poo over a paltry sixty thousand or so bees:Post Captain posted:Jack had the door-handle; he opened it a crack and glided swiftly through. "Killick!" he shouted, beating at his clothes.
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Oct 29, 2013 23:01
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Rereading "The Fortune of War". 1) Being a veteran of the U.S. Navy, and having had aspirations to go to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, it is strange to feel so sorry for Aubrey and the other RNs when Java is defeated by Constitution. The Action of 29 December 1812 is famous in the annals of U.S. Naval history, so reading about it from the other side, and with a sympathetic viewpoint, is interesting. 2) I love the oblique reference to John James Audubon when Johnson is trying to give Maturin a gift of ornithological prints, referring to "A young Frenchman I met on the Ohio River, a Creole, very talented..." 3) Stephen finally showing his wetworks side explicitly. 4) And the always hilarious description of Choate's Asclepia hospital and its inhabitants. It's one of my favorite books in the series, especially for the change of Scenery to early 19th century Boston.
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Nov 21, 2013 20:44
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Oh God, I'm in the middle of "The Surgeon's Mate", and have just hit what is possibly the funniest scene in the entire series. (no major spoilers, but if you haven't read it yet it's better to get to it with the full build-up) During the trip to Paris, when Jack, Stephen, and Jagiello are prisoners of war, and they have their enormous crayfish dinner with Duhamel...which turns out poorly, with their bowels becoming suitably volcanic, so that their arrival at the prison is totally undignified: "Their entrance into the grim ancient fortress was unlike any that Stephen had ever known. Duhamel had his door open before the carriage stopped, and followed by Jack and Jagiello, who trampled on Stephen and broke his larger bottle in their haste, he ran into the immense vaulted guard-room where those charged with receiving the prisoners sat among scaffolding and pails. With irresistible impetuosity they rushed past the deputy-governor, his secretary, the turnkeys and ran on, pale and earnest, down a dark corridor, Duhamel a good length ahead. " It was so perfectly set up, and the entire pages-long preface to the final bit of slapstick just built the comedic tension.
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Nov 28, 2013 07:58
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Ah, no matter how many times I read it, that moment in "The Reverse of the Medal" chokes me up every single time. It's like the diametric opposite of that moment in "Storm of Swords".
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Dec 16, 2013 06:17
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Thought this would be appreciated here: Some researchers extracted millions of location log entries from digitized logbooks of 19th and 19th century ships, and then plotted them on a map of the world. The results delineate the primary maritime trade routes of that time period, along with a couple of neat surprises explained by period technology. http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/636-painted-ships-on-painted-oceans-an-accidental-map-of-the-doldrums (Edit: one thing I find interesting is the divergence of routes to the Pacific Rim when approaching and then after rounding the Cape of Good Hope.) CarterUSM fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Jan 3, 2014 |
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Jan 3, 2014 20:39
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VendoViper posted:I will have to try making one of the shrubs soon, but I just put a drowned baby in the pot. Excited to pull it out in a few hours and see what the rage is all about. I mean it's basically a desert where the whole thing is made out of pie crust, so i am not sure how it could go wrong. If you're going to use a Papin's digester, for God's sake don't put a smoothing iron on the safety valve to make it cook faster.
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Sep 3, 2015 06:38
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Also, I just finished "Blue at the Mizzen" for about the 5th time, and it's still as bittersweet as it ever was, knowing that there were no books after that, but also knowing that Aubrey got his flag, and it appeared that Christine Wood was waiting for Stephen back in England. (Also, yes, I know there's "Twenty One", but I don't count that. A partially written book fleshed out by notes is good to get a sense of the overall plot, but not all the delightful layers of prose that O'Brien was so good at bringing.)
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Sep 3, 2015 06:41
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