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Here's a bit that I just got to in my re-read that I never quite understood, from The Letter of Marque. Stephen and Padeen are in his room at the Grapes, and I think they're getting Stephen's luggage together for a journey:quote:A heavy step on the stairs, and Mrs Broad, pushing the door open with a crooked elbow, came in with two piles of fresh laundry between her outstretched arms and her chin. "There now," she cried. "All your frilled shirts got up prime, with the finest goffering-iron you ever seen. Mrs Maturin always liked them got up in Cecil Court," she added in an aside to Stephen, and then loud and clear to Padeen, as though he were at the masthead, "In the wery middle, Padeen, between the spare sheets and the lamb's wool drawers." Is it just that they'd already sealed up Stephen's sea-chest before the laundry came? What are Stephen and Padeen doing, why so guilty, and what's the deal with bringing chairs to get to the top of the wardrobe? e: oh, is he just hiding his frilled shirts on top of the wardrobe because he hates them, and got caught like a guilty child? Phenotype fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Oct 7, 2018 |
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Oct 7, 2018 03:59
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I have read that passage 3 or 4 times and I never figured it out til I sat down and typed it out. I always thought he was having Padeen pack the shirts into his sea-chest or the wardrobe, and I couldn't figure out why he needed to be on top of a chair or why they were so embarrassed to get caught. So he's hiding the shirts in a stack of newspapers on top of the wardrobe? I thought they were just packing the shirts with newspaper so they didn't get crushed inside the sea-chest. 
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Oct 7, 2018 06:26
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yaffle posted:My favorite is a multi-ship action in a small bay in the med, I can't remember which book, possibly Treason's Harbor? It has a lovely description of the Surprise "Throwing out sail after sail" as she come to the rescue of another ship, which unfortunately explodes. Yeah, that one was fun. Jack ends it feeling dejected, even though they wrecked one of the French frigates on the way out, and then the start of the next book has an admiral telling Jack he needs to rewrite his report to make it sound like the victory it actually was. I remember being vaguely disappointed with some of the last battles (Hundred Days?) where Jack is in charge of a squadron and in command of a 74, and thinking "Man, we're finally going to see a big fleet action" only to have it described in a few lines as Jack laying alongside the enemy ship-of-the-line and hammering them until they struck their colors. I remember realizing that yeah, there's probably no one in the world that can accurately describe something like that anymore. But I can't believe no one's mentioned the Surprise rushing to cut off Linois' 74 to protect the China convoy in HMS Surprise. Basically a suicide run exposing his tiny frigate to fifteen minutes of broadsides in hopes of laying off her bow and smashing her up enough to make Linois turn away. Or the battle with the Torgud and her terrible consorts where the Royal Navy just makes a joke out of their half-trained sailors.
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Oct 12, 2018 04:19
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Made a Drowned Baby last night from the Lobscouse and Spotted Dog cookbook! It calls for a cup and a half of raisins, I threw in a cup of dried blueberries and cherries and half a cup of crushed almonds (because that's what I had!), otherwise followed the recipe pretty closely. Came out really tasty, even though it looks like a lump. The little specks are just almond or possibly cinnamon:  I didn't think to take pictures until it was already done and we'd sawed a couple slices off, unfortunately. I wasn't sure what to expect from a suet "pudding" that gets boiled for 2-3 hours -- I'm American and puddings are little cups of chocolate gel that you put in lunches for schoolkids. Turns out it's kind of like a dense, rich-tasting bread. I used beef suet from a UK distributor, and there wasn't any meaty taste at all, which I was worried about. All the ingredients get mixed up (mostly just flour, water, sugar, and suet) to make a dense little football of dough, then I tied it up in cheesecloth and tied a strip around the middle as the book suggests to keep it from opening. It swelled up a little bit, but it still looked like raw dough when we pulled it out, as you can see. It tastes like it's cooked through, anyway. If anyone wants to tell me I should have left it boil for longer, I'd bow to their wisdom because I didn't know what I was making in the first place. I whipped up the Sherry Sauce in the book as it was finishing (just butter, sugar, a little brandy, and lemon juice), which made it even better -- it kinda needs butter or some sort of sauce if you're gonna eat more than a small piece, since it's so thick. Very good with coffee too the next day, warmed in the microwave for a minute. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Oct 25, 2018 |
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Oct 25, 2018 17:23
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I've got another box of suet, so I'm definitely going to make another one of the puddings in the book. Probably this weekend after I hit the grocery store so I have a few more ingredients and spices on hand. I'll try to remember to take pictures of the next one, it was kind of a neat little project. I'm not much of a cook, though! A lot of the recipes call for pastry building that I've never done before, and a lot of them assume you're feeding a large number of people. A lot of them seem godawful too, haha -- I'm not making dog's body, which is essentially a giant mass of peas mashed up with butter and boiled to death. I'll probably do at least one of the entrees though.
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Oct 25, 2018 22:44
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Tried out another suet pudding from the Lobscouse and Spotted Dog cookbook, this one's a Jam Roly Poly! This is suet! I didn't know what the hell to expect from this stuff before I opened it.  Weird dry little kernels a little bigger than a grain of rice.  The recipe for the dough was pretty much the same as the last - suet, flour, sugar, water. I couldn't stop myself from adding almonds to this one too because they were really good in the Drowned Baby. Might not have been the greatest idea, though!  Looks like a gross little ball of dough when everything was mixed up.  The dough looks a little more appetizing after you knead the poo poo out of it and let it rest for a bit. The almonds are making it a little knobbier than it oughta be, I might have added too much.  Roll the dough out into a rectangle, according to the book. I thought I was being clever by making it longer than it was wide, but I probably should have made it narrower still.  Spread out the jam, grab one of the short sides, and roll it up, sealing the sides up as you go! As it turned out, I either put too much jam in, messed up the rolling, or just didn't leave myself enough empty dough, because the jam squidged out when I was finishing the roll-up.  You're supposed to pinch the dough closed to make a seam, but my seam kept coming apart a little because of all the jam, as you can see. If I'd done this before, I would have left myself a little extra dough for patching. The almonds made it a little more difficult to do, too.  Wrap it up in cheesecloth, tie the ends off, and tie a couple strips around the middle to keep it from opening. This thing is WAY longer than I wanted it to be, should have made it a lot narrower and longer when I rolled out the dough so it'd be shorter and fatter now. I thought I'd be able to smoosh it smaller like I could with the Drowned Baby, but the jam meant it would come apart if I tried. Also looks like it's bleeding a bit from the seam, but not much we can do now!  The size isn't a problem at first, plopped it in the largest pot I have.  Two hours later, it's pushing the lid off. Whoops! We'll know for next time. Turned the water a dull yellow, too. I cannot imagine having to be the Surprise's cook on a Sunday. Just this one tub heated up my house, boiling for 2-3 hours, and steamed up all the windows. If I had to tend to three hundred-weight of plum duff I'd never stop sweating.  And it's plumped up quite a bit too!  I didn't realize this photo was so blurry, had my hands full making Custard Sauce at the time! I was worried about the seam coming apart in the pot, but it didn't spread or open at all. The recipe book specifically says to serve it seam-side down, so I guess a little sloppiness is expected when you roll it up.  Seam-side down. A big, dense, doughy mass. That bit of brown on the end was the tip that was sticking out of the water for the last hour, it's a little drier than the rest but otherwise just fine.  Looks pretty good on the inside, though!   A couple slices.  With Custard Sauce! Mine came out a little clumpy, but it tastes really good. (I think it was the hacked-together double boiler I used.)  These are kinda fun to make! I'm definitely bringing one to Thanksgiving dinner this year. Once you get past the weird boiled exterior it's honestly a pretty good little dessert. Really dense, like a mix between a pancake and banana or nut bread, and nice and moist. Very good with coffee, and great for breakfast too -- it's not as sweet as you'd think, only 1/4 cup of sugar to 4 cups flour. The jam in the Roly Poly does make it seem a bit sweeter than the Drowned Baby, though, as it bleeds into the dough a little. Hope this wasn't too long, but you guys seemed interested before. This cookbook is a lot of fun! Phenotype fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Nov 4, 2018 |
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Nov 3, 2018 21:29
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Is that an experienced opinion? I've never made these things before, and I thought the same thing when I took them out of the pot, so if you're familiar with these puddings I'd love to hear it. I followed the recipe pretty accurately, and the Jam Roly Poly was in for almost 3 hours instead of 2.5 because I was messing around with the Custard Sauce. I even kept boiling the replacement water before I added it so they didn't stop cooking. They taste cooked, so I just assumed that this was what you get when you haul 5 pounds of boiling dough out of the water.
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Nov 4, 2018 01:12
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Not boiling it in the water would make an entirely different dish, though. The tip of the Roly Poly that was just being steamed was a lot drier, a much different texture. And these things were definitely boiled in the book. I dunno, I'm not convinced that's not just how the things look. It doesn't taste doughy at all, and the texture is pretty consistent throughout. I'm not trying to be argumentative, but my buddy who's a sous chef said the same thing -- it looks undercooked but it tastes cooked.
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Nov 4, 2018 01:59
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I read the first 2 or 3, and seeing the land side of things is interesting. I thought they seemed quite a bit trashier(?), though, less historical fiction and more adventure story set in the early 1800s. I've been reading the Alan Lewrie books after I lost interest in Sharpe, and these have been pretty fun. They're also a little more trashy adventure story than O'Brian, and I could do without the occasional sex scene, but they seem stronger from a historical perspective than Sharpe. Lewrie takes part in a lot of interesting stuff, like the fight to resupply Cornwallis at the end of the American Revolution, the fall of Toulon during the French Revolution, and meeting Nelson and Napoleon. I liked his books quite a bit more than Sharpe, although in general I think I prefer the naval side of things over the army. Why do both of those series seem so much more anachronistic than O'Brian? I can't put my finger on exactly how or why, but no one else has captured the feeling of actually being in that time period half as well as he did. (Except Jane Austen, but well.) And speaking of which, should I generally take O'Brian's word over Lewrie's author when they contradict eachother? The Lewrie books had stuff like lieutenants in charge of sloops, commanders in charge of frigates, and often had naval battles where one ship sunk her opponent in a couple broadsides, versus the day-long hammerings in the Aubrey-Maturin books. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Apr 20, 2019 |
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Apr 20, 2019 18:43
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Kylaer posted:I read this series (except the unfinished one) a couple of years ago and I'm starting a re-read of it now. It's such an odd body of work. The writing can be (and usually is) excellent, but the author's willingness to have so many major plot points settled by deus ex machina (usually happening outside the observation of any of the characters) is just bizarre. I guess it's realistic but it flies in the face of what I consider the basic rules of writing. I thought it was odd at first too, especially on my first run through the books, but in the end its one of the things that makes the series seem so authentic. Jack gets to be the hero often enough, but so many things happen that are out of his control, it makes him come across less like a naval hero protagonist than an actual 1800s naval captain living through his life and getting buffeted by forces larger than him. Ships are going to be smashed by storms instead of direct battle, admirals are going to come and take over at the last minute, and the secret services are going to do their own thing behind the scenes where Jack and Stephen would never naturally intersect. Which particular bits were you thinking of when you said "bizarre", out of curiosity?
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Jun 21, 2019 01:06
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What was a "pot of coffee" back then? I just got to the bit in Reverse of the Medal where Jack meets a guy in a chophouse and the guy offers to share his chaise with him. The guy gets up from the table and Jack says "Aren't you going to stay for coffee?" and the guy says his stomach is disturbed but don't worry, you'll have time for two or even three pots of coffee. And then he says let's meet at the chaise in a quarter of an hour, and I'm left wondering how anyone could possibly drink three pots of coffee in fifteen minutes. I assume we're talking a small moka pot full of coffee, but even so. Did people just gulp them down back then?
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Jun 24, 2020 00:41
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Are they not? I heard the average English gentleman usually drank about two bottles of wine each day anyway, and probably more when they were going to dinner parties. There was definitely more than one occasion where Jack's dinner guests slid off their seats in an alcoholic stupor.
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Jun 24, 2020 00:49
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Molybdenum posted:ive said this before but this series of books was my first introduction into the genre as a whole. after obrian i read the dudley pope series, cs forester and now im reading bernard cornwall's sharpe novels. i feel like im always chasing the high i got from reading obrian and i may never get it again except for the inevitable re-reads. If Dewey Lambdin is on your list, rest assured he never gets anywhere near as good as O'Brian, either. I've read him, Forrester, and the first few Sharpe novels and yeah, nothing's come close. Forrester's probably the closest for getting the versimilitude right, but Hornblower is kind of a boring, rigid protagonist that I couldn't bring myself to like very much. Lambdin's Alan Lewrie is at least an interesting character, even if his novels are a bit more pulpy (and, at least early on, contain some cringey sex scenes), and he does go to a lot of interesting places and periods. I also read Pride and Prejudice, which was actually a lot more interesting and funnier than I'd expected, and probably a LOT easier to read now that I've had a grounding in the subtleties of that era. I've been meaning to read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norris, which I've heard is very good at verisimilitude, although it's about supernatural stuff rather than realistic history. It's been sitting on my bookshelves for months while I re-read O'Brian.
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Jul 3, 2020 21:50
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The Lord Bude posted:Elaborate dinner parties were easier when the work involved in organising them was 'rattle off some instructions to the servants and then reward yourself for the effort with a gin and tonic'. I watch The Great British Bake Off sometimes, and it's funny the way this influenced their traditional dishes -- British cooking and baking seems to go in for very intricate design work a lot of the time, stuff that's very labor intensive, because to the landed gentry, labor was incredibly cheap, so why not demand the best, fanciest-looking food you can imagine?
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Jul 9, 2020 17:17
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jerman999 posted:I think Mauritius command would lend itself well to a 10-12 episode season. Tightly defined story, interesting characters. D Aw, don't tease me. Mauritius Command is my favorite book, I think. And yeah, it's one of the few that almost fits into a neat package for a TV show or movie, starting in England with Stephen coming to visit Jack at his home with the promise of a ship, and a natural conclusion in the successful invasion. The sideplot with Clonfert -- poor, insecure, vulnerable Clonfert trying to play the part of a dashing sea captain and having to face up to a man who embodies the real thing, with no showing-off or playacting, a man who he thought was an equal -- is one of my favorite bits in the entire series, too. That final line of Maturin's, "you cannot blame the bull because the frog burst, the bull has no comprehension of the affair" gives me chills every time.
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Aug 8, 2020 16:10
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freebooter posted:Now it sounds like I'm romanticising the past which isn't what I meant to do... I guess you're right. I am searching for meaning, and romanticising the past. Well, that's the draw of books like this. I don't actually want to spend months sleeping four hours at a time and climbing a hundred feet up in the rain to pull on a rope, but I would like to have that experience of stepping off the ship in a mysterious unknown foreign land filled with people we barely understand and creatures we've never seen. I can take a plane trip to India and stay at the Marriott, but it's not the same at all.
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Aug 15, 2020 01:49
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builds character posted:Don't they talk about this a bit? One of the reasons you have to impress people is that the navy pays less well than other occupations (which also don't involve getting shot as a general rule) so able seamen prefer to be in not-the-navy. I know they impress other folks from time to time but my understanding of the practice generally is that it was primarily for sailors. I think it paid better than other laborer jobs, it was just that you had to be isolated from the entire world, living in a close packed airless wooden ship with a hundred other filthy sailors, and you had to do hard labor at all hours of the night and your superiors were allowed to beat you and you'd be soaked and wet and miserable, subject to hundred-degree heat and freezing winds and might end up shot or drowned or mutilated from flying splinters. I know they talked about how merchantmen paid better than the Navy, but that was probably not a factor for the average impressed landsman.
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Aug 21, 2020 02:37
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Pwnstar posted:Aubrey is the original himbo. He knows about sailing but otherwise he's a big goof, Russel Crowe needed to oaf it up a bit imo. I've always thought a younger John Goodman would have been a great Jack Aubrey. Too late now, obviously, but he's the right mix of fat/big/strong and can be oafish and funny but also serious and commanding. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Feb 26, 2021 |
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Feb 26, 2021 19:32
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Raskolnikov2089 posted:Rosie O'Donnell as Jacquelyn "Jack" Aubrey, Melissa McCarthy as Stephanie Maturin, and The Rock as Barret Bonden. cursed
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Mar 2, 2021 21:16
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Notahippie posted:Isn’t there a scene where someone - I think Martin - learns his typical dose and is so shocked that he almost comments on it? Heroic doses daily may have been what O’Brian intended. Yep, but of course he wouldn't make any comment because that sort of thing just isn't done between gentlemen, much less between an assistant to his surgeon. I remember on my first read through the series, I had been just sorta taking Stephen's word for it until then -- he was a doctor and he was dosing himself and it might look like addiction to an onlooker but it was actually carefully controlled and hah, they sound like such obvious excuses now, don't they, especially once you learn how massive his doses are compared to what they use for the sailors. I also liked the scene in The Letter of Marque when he tumbles down the stairs and injures himself, and the doctor who treats him, again, can't quite come out and say directly "you're an opium junkie", but takes no poo poo and strongly implies that he knows exactly what Stephen has been up to with his bottle. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 20:25 on May 23, 2021 |
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May 23, 2021 19:14
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Fuzzy Mammal posted:Can someone explain a bit what happens militarily to close out the Mauritius Command? Clonfert's one-sided relationship with Jack is one of my favorite parts of the entire series. Here comes Jack Aubrey, big, bluff, bold, the very model of an enterprising British naval hero, and moreover, Jack embodies that model unconsciously and naturally -- this is what he IS. And Clonfert desperately wants to see himself as an enterprising British naval hero, but he's the very opposite -- anxious, vain, and insecure, trying so hard to act the part of the dashing young captain and KNOWING he's acting a part, so that his officers and crew get in the habit of showering him with praise to help keep the act together. Being in such close proximity to Jack can't help but ruin the fantasy that he's built up for himself though, even though Jack is perfectly cordial and has no idea of any sort of competition between them. We learn through Stephen's conversations with Clonfert's doctor that Clonfert is probably suffering from an ulcer, one that gets worse every time Jack does something dashing and bold and reminds Clonfert that he's only an imitation, a pretender. I'm not sure whether or not he was indeed a coward, but I think he was conscious that Jack might think him so, which led to him acting even more rash while in battle. He was supposed to hold that bit of the island and, while he was acting like a bit of an idiot on the island, it was a different captain who had ultimate command and made some stupid mistakes that lost them the battle and the ships stationed there. Even so, it ruined Clonfert. He failed, lost his ship, was gravely injured (losing the good looks that made him popular with the ladies,) and again, here comes this big, bluff, bold naval hero -- everything that Clonfert wanted so much to be -- who is going to tell him how he cleaned up Clonfert's failures and unconsciously impress upon him again how Clonfert could never be the dashing captain that Jack effortlessly embodied. I love Maturin's inward reflection at the end. From memory: "You cannot blame the bull because the bullfrog burst, the bull has no notion of the affair."
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Jun 29, 2021 02:45
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Phy posted:I mean it does have Nagle being flogged for disrespecting Hollom It's not always that he consciously thinks that he'd be seen as shockingly lax by his colleagues, he just does it because it's part of the system that he was raised in -- some offenses are just ones that rate a flogging. I think there are a few times where he does it because he doesn't want the hands to see him as weak, or jockeying for popularity. And I just finished a re-read of Post-Captain, where his lovely first lieutenant Parker orders a lot of undeserved floggings, but as far as Jack sees it he has to back up his officers and can't reduce the punishments.
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Jul 10, 2021 19:10
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MeatwadIsGod posted:I will say that the 1812a-1812b timescale is really starting to mess with me. When I think of events from Fortune of War or Surgeon's Mate they feel like they happened to a Stephen or a Jack of ten years earlier instead of just a few months earlier. At least O'Brian was candid enough in his author's note to say he would have done the chronology totally differently if he knew ahead of time how much he'd enjoy writing the series. I forget if there's a break on land after Surgeon's Mate, but I always figured about fifteen or twenty years had passed since the beginning of the series til Far Side of the World -- I think that's around the time Jack and Stephen start complaining about their age. I've never had a problem with the timeline, though. It helps that, besides the actions with the American frigates, Jack and Stephen are usually further outside what you'd think of as the "main plot" of history, so it's fine to imagine them taking years sailing off to India or Mauritius and when they return the French are still around as the eternal enemy, and the war with Napoleon has just been raging in the background while they're off on adventures. I don't think they ever straight-up mention what year it is, either. MASH aired for eleven years and no one ever wondered why the war was still going on. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Sep 14, 2021 |
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Sep 14, 2021 02:41
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Hah, maybe it's just because you guys are a lot better at history than I am. I don't really know what's supposed to be happening when, so I'm not thinking "Oh it's the War of 1812, only a couple years til Napoleon escapes!" I'm just thinking "Okay they're at war with the Americans now and then Jack and Stephen can go on any number of timeless adventures until they next decide to refer to a major historical event." Like I said, it seems like O'Brien purposely put them outside the more famous battles and fleet actions so that history wouldn't keep getting in the way of whatever sea stories he wanted to tell. (I also like that Jack was involved with two of the frigate actions with the Americans in Fortune of War, but in both cases he was just there as a passenger and didn't have any command or responsibility besides directing a few cannons.)
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Sep 14, 2021 22:13
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Hot Dog Day #82 posted:How did the ship’s biscuit turn out? I’ve been tempted to try to make that on a few occasions now, but always lose my courage I'd think it'd just be a really bland cracker, no? It's pretty much just flour and water with a pinch of salt if I recall correctly.
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May 28, 2022 02:57
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You certainly were. I started with O'Brian, and he's just head and shoulders above any other similar fiction I've tried. Hornblower is probably closest for verisimilitude, but he's such a closed-off, dull person that his books are nowhere near as much fun, and they don't go as deeply into life ashore, either. I've also tried the Alan Lewrie books, which seem like the other extreme -- he's an interesting character who does a lot of fun things, but his books are kinda trashy and nowhere near as immersive. Tried Sharpe too, actually, but the army stuff isn't as fun as the stuff they get up to at sea, and after reading 3-4 of them you really notice how similar and shallow they are, just fun adventure stories without much meat to them.
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Sep 22, 2022 05:32
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I think if you want the closest thing to more Aubrey-Maturin, then you should read the Hornblower series. I think they just about match O'Brien as far as feeling true to the time period, and they're solid reads. Hornblower does some fun things but the character in general is a much less fun than anyone in the A-M series, though, kind of a depressing stick-in-the-mud sorta guy. The books don't touch on life outside the Navy nearly as much, either, and the timeline isn't always consistent from book to book -- I think there are quite a few retcons as the author jumps around to write interesting events into different points in Hornblower's career. Still pretty good books, though, just can't compare to O'Brien. Agree with everything that's been said on the Sharpe books, too -- they're fun reads but you finish a couple and you've kinda seen em all. Xander77 posted:In my opinion, the Aubrey-Maturin books, with the same basic setting (a ship), same crew of characters and same gags are WAY the gently caress more repetitious than Sharpe. But others in the thread don't share that opinion. This is cracked, though, right? Sometimes they're stuck on land in England for most of the book, sometimes they're stuck on land in America, sometimes they go ashore on ill-advised trips through the desert, sometimes they're on a ship but stop in India or Australia or some desolate island, sometimes they're stuck doing convoy duty, sometimes they're out cruising and taking prizes, sometimes they're part of a squadron hunting for the French. I've only read 4-5 Sharpe books but I didn't think there was really any comparison.
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Jan 21, 2023 06:59
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Raskolnikov2089 posted:Was this also meant to be funny in Jane Austen's day? I love Mr. Collins letting out his inner mean girl here. It's meant to be funny, but it's not Mr. Collins letting out his inner mean girl, he's just a ridiculous person in general. I read Pride and Prejudice after having read the A-M series at least twice, and it's not only a lot easier to get through than I thought, but it's legitimately funny in a lot of places. Jane Austen was just as aware as we are of how silly the customs of the English gentry could be.
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Feb 12, 2023 21:57
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Genghis Cohen posted:It would be insidious to choose ... no, something not right there ... invidious ... but for me that's the most powerful dramatic moment in the series. "My god, oh my god" said Jack. "Six hundred men". gives me chills every time. That's a great one, but I think my choice is "You cannot blame the bull because the bullfrog burst, the bull has no notion of the affair." Or possibly "Off hats!" from The Reverse of the Medal.
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Apr 7, 2023 17:17
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Notahippie posted:That one sticks with me, too. I don't even know if I agree with it, but it's such an interesting reflection on Jack's character and Stephen's take on morality. Honestly, the entire three-way relationship between that officer, his surgeon, and Jack is a completely amazing meditation on human frailty. Where do you disagree? That's why I love that whole side plot as well -- here's Jack Aubrey, a model of the Royal Navy post-captain, and just being himself, without acting or artifice, forces the less-confident Clonfert to recognize all the ways he falls short, and the desperation behind all his showy antics meant to convince himself that he doesn't. You can't blame the bull, because Jack had no notion of the affair. There's really no one to blame at all, just the unfortunate result of a frail man confronted with the true example of the character he so desperately wanted to become.
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Apr 8, 2023 05:57
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Kylaer posted:And the hell of it is that Clonfert isn't even a bad captain. He's just not great, and knows it, and he wants to be great more than anything in life. He wants Aubrey's reputation and he just doesn't quite have what it takes to achieve it, and it kills him. Yeah, it's a very complex balancing act that O'Brian is doing. I really like the scene where he's boasting about his adventures with Sydney Smith(?). I forget if Jack or Stephen was listening to him, but they reflected that Smith really did do a lot of great things, with Clonfert along with him, but Clonfert is still talking obvious nonsense, like telling them the horn on his wall was from a unicorn and he saw Sydney cut it off the horse's head himself, when they could tell perfectly well that it was a narwhal's horn. I think that's what makes me love that book so much -- I go back and forth between Mauritius Command and Letter of Marque as my favorite. I feel like in any other writer's hands, Clonfert would just be an arrogant idiot, the captain who has his officers fawning over him, the guy who tells bullshit stories to make himself feel important, but O'Brian writes him as such a realistic, three-dimensional individual.
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Apr 9, 2023 05:02
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Yeah, that's my general feeling too. Jack is even at some level aware that Clonfert sees him as a rival, or even as someone who's beaten him -- isn't there a passage where Jack promotes Clonfert into a frigate and Clonfert's like "I never thought it would be you giving me my step"? Stephen's not going to tell him that Clonfert is literally making himself sick over his little internal competition, but otherwise Jack pretty much understands what's going on. He just can't know that the poor guy is so obsessed over the whole thing that he'd rather tear his throat open than have to congratulate Jack on the victory.
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Apr 13, 2023 05:55
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Almost finished with my latest readthrough, and realized I had a couple questions about The Hundred Days. What was the Surprise doing all this time? Just sitting docked at Shelmerston? It feels like a period of at least a year or two has gone by, since Jack was on the beach for a bit, then was given Bellona and sent after the slavers, then spent some time on the Brest blockade. But he's immediately got a full crew of well-trained seamen that embarrasses the Pomone with their gunnery exhibition when he's given the squadron at Funchal in The Hundred Days. And how did Maturin get back his wealth? Last I remember reading was that it had been seized in Spain, but then halfway through the book he's meeting with Sir Joseph and they're talking about how Maturin is a wealthy man again. I tried to read back but couldn't find a passage explaining it.
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May 15, 2023 14:42
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I thought Diana went to India with her father and got married to a soldier there, and then both of them died and left her very little, so she had to come back to live with her Aunt Williams, Sophie's mum.
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May 28, 2023 05:50
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I just pulled off a bandage and bled a little bit on my gym shorts and as always, I heard Mrs. Williams' shrill voice in my head reminding me "You must always use cold water for blood! Should they not be told they must use cold water for blood?" Got it clean, too. We manage tolerably well at sea, ma'am.
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Aug 21, 2023 19:32
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Mulaney Power Move posted:Post Captain is a great reread IMO. I never even realizee what Scriven was really doing until the second read. StrixNebulosa posted:I'm only a few pages into Post Captain and already enjoying it a lot more this go 'round, as I'm not sitting around being impatient for Jack to have a boat again! Instead - since I know it's coming - I'm just enjoying the comedy of Stephen hanging out with the most subtle spy of all time, Jack's horse having his own POV and agenda, and so on. Is this just a reference to Scrivens signaling the bailiffs to come arrest Jack at the party? That line about a subtle spy made me wonder if there's something else I missed, but from my reading he wasn't "really doing" anything in particular, he was just a pathetic little scrub that failed at being a highwayman and sold them out at the first opportunity.
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Sep 16, 2023 18:25
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Lockback posted:21 doesn't tarnish anything, but it also doesn't really make things better. It's really just the table setting for the next group of books and it doesn't even get that far into table setting. It's definitely unfinished, definitely a draft, but also there just isn't enough there to mean or impact much. Yeah, there's really not much finished text and what's there is unpolished, and the rest of it is just notes and stuff. It's more of a curiosity than a real book. I'm still glad I got it, if only as a glimpse into O'Brian's process and as a capstone for the bookshelf. 
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Jan 10, 2024 20:48
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Psion posted:I think you cracked the secret as to why people would eat those things! They're really good! I made a couple of the puddings a year or two back -- I posted a trip report in this thread if you ? me -- and it makes a really nice dessert or breakfast. It tastes kind of like a moist, dense pancake with fruit inside. I think it'd be too thick without the cream sauce or maybe some syrup, though. It's too hard to find beef suet here or I'd make em more often, but I had to order it from a UK foods place online. But yeah, a lot of the stuff in the recipe book comes directly from the books, and a lot of it isn't really practical to do. There are some puddings and pies and drinks that might be fun to make, but most of the others are either intricate dishes from some culture they were visiting that I certainly don't have all the ingredients for, or simple recipes made at sea or by people in poverty that I'm not gonna eat since I have better alternatives.
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Jan 13, 2024 17:47
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 07:00 |
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https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/1768291733249327389 Well, this is kinda cool. They named a newly-discovered giant turtle after the god-turtle Maturin in the Stephen King novels, who in turn was named after Stephen Maturin from the Aubrey-Maturin novels. So in a way, Stephen Maturin ends up with his own little bit of immortality just like Jack does, in-universe, with testudo aubreii.
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Mar 18, 2024 17:32
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