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Perfect. Maybe it's because I always found most of the non-Sesame Street muppets frightening and offputting as a kid, but it's comedy gold to me to imagine the scene where he's making his way through the lower decks on the verge of a panic attack while they're all staring at him malevolently, and it's just all those horrible little puppets.
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Dec 27, 2021 05:37
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Still on my first-time read through and just finished The Commodore and it's almost sort of sad, from a reader's perspective, that Jack's now a commodore commanding a squadron. It's like in the later seasons of a sitcom when the carefree 20-something housemates become 30-something adults and pair off and get married and have kids. Makes you miss the simpler times of being a POW in Boston. Thought I do admire that O'Brian managed to drag out his just-a-captaincy for a full 17 books, and the four-book circumnavigation feels like a last hurrah for those youthful adventurous days.
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Jan 13, 2022 08:28
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On my first read-through and just finished The Yellow Admiral and absolutely loved that ending. Bringing the timeline back out of its frozen-in-amber status and ending with a letter bearing that sentence - "Napoleon has escaped Elba" - was genuinely as shocking to me as it would've been to Jack and makes it feel like the series suddenly has stakes beyond the characters' personal lives again. Not that I ain't invested in the characters' personal lives, but it's a certainly fresh take after 17 or 18 books, and was a genuine frisson-inducing ~Moment~.
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Feb 12, 2022 10:52
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Hot Dog Day #82 posted:It took me the better part of two years, but I finally finished the series tonight for the first time. It’s also the first time in a long time where I felt… depressed isn’t the right word, but forlorn about finishing? The characters in the book were with me during a lonely time in my life, and reading a 20 book series on friendship was helpful to me. I look forward to giving it another read through soon! I have been rationing the series out for a few per year precisely because I don't want to come to this point. I still have two to go but started Master & Commander in 2015! (It's also because I like to read them when travelling or at the very least in summer on the beach; because it's useful to have books that I know I'll like in reserve for long plane rides - I think I read a full one in a single sitting on the way to Europe in 2019 and another in a single sitting on the way back; and because two years of pandemic lockdowns sitting in my one-bedroom apartment was a miserable and isolating time when I did not want to read about rich companionship and sailing over the horizon)
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Apr 5, 2022 12:21
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Molybdenum posted:Anyone listen to the lubbers hole podcast? I started at episode 87, the re-read of the series. Good so far. Yeah it's really good - which is a good thing because as far as I can tell it's the only Aubrey-Maturin podcast out there.
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Apr 26, 2022 09:30
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On my first read-through (across many years, I like to ration them) and just finished 19, The Hundred Days. Without spoiling too much for what remains, can anyone illuminate me on: Wtf is with the left-field, quickly dismissed deaths of Diana and Bonden? O'Brian is not, on the whole, an author I consider to embrace the nihilistic nature of the universe even if the nature of war lends itself to that (unlike eg Larry McMurtry). I can't think of a previous situation in which a critical character has been so randomly killed; Bonden's death is treated as though he was some random nice fella who'd just been introduced that book, and while more shrift is given to Diana, we really don't delve into Stephen's grief much - we honestly see far more of it during their on again/off again relationship and his consistent heartbreak across books 2 through 15 or so. Did O'Brian lose his wife at the time, or something like that? Was he getting bored of the series? I honestly don't know what to make of it.
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Jul 18, 2022 11:02
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Sax Solo posted:Is there any sign that anyone feels anything about the death of Bonden? It makes me wonder why he killed Bonden off at all. I suppose there's a poignancy to being killed in what would be one of the very last actions of the war, but nobody seems to dwell on that. Obviously the series was cut off by O'Brien's own death, but it does leave it in a rather awkward position - 19 books of Napoleonic action and then one and a half in Chile or whatever it is. Given that he pumped them out at a solid rate of one per year it makes you wonder how far he intended to take them, especially since he only ended 1812b and restored them to ordinary time in book 18.
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Jul 21, 2022 08:37
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Arglebargle III posted:I think he did exactly what he planned: keep writing adventures until he died For sure but it's weird the death happened almost but not quite at the end of the Napoleonic wars Genghis Cohen posted:This. I'm glad it apparently crops up in the next (last!) book, however subtly; in The Hundred Days it's barely mentioned apart from the event itself PlushCow posted:There was a story about a year ago about making a prequel movie but who knows if it will actually go into production: https://deadline.com/2021/06/20th-century-master-and-commander-patrick-ness-1234769535/ 20 years was a long time ago and the age of good films is over. My dream is now for an HBO series with a few books per season and a Game of Thrones level budget. Which I actually think would be a goer, if not for the fact that producers would immediately blanche at the notion of period-drama on-water filming and all the hassles and dramas involved in that.
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Jul 22, 2022 11:28
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The Lord Bude posted:Yeah I’d absolutely prefer it to be done high budget streaming show style. 12 episodes a season. I reckon you could do the first 2 books in season 1 - very possibly 3 but that might be a stretch because 3 is quite packed from memory. I reckon you could get those 3 books into a 12-episode season of 60 or even 40 minutes each. All the best TV series these days know how to edit well. And if GOT was given the budget to shoot on location in Iceland, I reckon you can get away with passing off most of the Mediterranean as itself and then using Morocco and the Canaries as a stand-in for India and Malaysia respectively, with the help of a lot of Mandalorian-style next-level green screening. Once the series starts getting buzz around season 3 you can DEMAND on-location shooting in the South Pacific, Kiribati will be grateful for the economic boost. I'd also be inclined to cut or at least postpone The Mauritius Command. I feel like O'Brien wrote that without an inkling that he was going to write another 16 books in the series and it feels off, narrative-arc-wise, for Aubrey to be temporarily promoted to commodore that early in the overall story... and then promptly demoted and finding himself at the beginning of a long string of authorial excuses to stymie any further promotion that might see him behind a desk instead of chasing privateers around the Horn.
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Jul 24, 2022 12:27
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Read Blue at the Mizzen and 21 over my summer break, finishing my first ever read through of the series (since I only read a few of them a year). I started Master and Commander in spring in 2015 sitting in a park in London, and ended 21 sitting on a remote beach in Western Australia, which feels appropriate. What a series. If there'd been a "better" time to end the series, if O'Brian had wanted to, I think it might have been either the poignant Reverse of the Medal scene discussed upthread, or the end of The Hundred Days with the end of the war. But given it was an unwitting end to the series, by chance I think it ends quite appropriately: aboard Surprise, at sea.
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Jan 15, 2023 06:24
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Lockback posted:The first three books definitely make up an arc. Mauritius Command is a bit of a side story, or almost feels like a flash forward in some ways. I've only read through the series the once, but Mauritius Command definitely struck me at the time as a book where O'Brien was anxious to get his big real-life campaign with the Warhammer-equivalent figurines out, which he might not have been so quick with if he'd magically foreseen that he'd be writing 20 of these.
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Jul 28, 2023 14:22
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:34 |
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I'm doing my first re-read and was probably too young/stupid to grasp nuance when I first read through the early books, but I'm on Post Captain now and have to admit I still can't tell - and I know it's gauche to even ask - but are Jack and/or Stephen actually having sex with Diana? I'm only up to the escape from France, but evidence so far indicating they do actually gently caress in those opening chapters: - Diana mentions how cold it is in her house so says she's going to go sit in bed ("man... now my PANTS are chafing me!") and invites Stephen to come "sit by her" (or something) when he's finished his brandy - Can't recall the exact wording but Jack mentions to Christy-Palliere that he feels he's left Diana's honour in something of a pickle, which I read to mean that he's obliged to marry her if they've hosed (though I'm not sure that's actually true since she's already been married and therefore isn't a virgin?) Also, when they're aboard the merchantman, Jack is telling the girls about his recuperation at Stephen's castle (which occurred off-screen) and how sick he was and how Stephen was bleeding and dosing him daily, to what seems to the reader like an excessive amount but which Jack accepts unquestioningly. This almost reads as though Stephen is taking advantage of his position as Jack's doctor to deliver a sort of revenge, but surely he'd never be petty enough to violate his Hippocratic oath, even in the greyest of ways?
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May 21, 2024 10:02
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