Rebeccah

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Rebeccah is Currently Reading

Rebeccah is currently reading

Master and Commander (Aubrey & Maturin, #1)

by Patrick O'Brian

bookshelves: books-i-own-and-have-read, currently-reading, audio

Reading for the 2nd time

read in July 2024

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Rebeccah said: " This book has been quietly on my radar for probably about 15 years now, but I’ve never been compelled to pick it up until this past week. I had heard it was good, but it just didn’t sound like something I would care much about.

Boy was I wrong! I had This book has been quietly on my radar for probably about 15 years now, but I’ve never been compelled to pick it up until this past week. I had heard it was good, but it just didn’t sound like something I would care much about.

Boy was I wrong! I had so much fun with this. Although it is heavy on the nautical jargon (even the dialogue attempting to explain some of this jargon to an ignorant landman–and thus, the reader–was difficult for me to follow) it is also packed with action, adventure, peril and, most importantly, hilarious wit and characters that are so vibrantly alive. I laughed out loud too many times to count. Jack Aubrey is a boisterous, capable, sometimes dim but always genuine character; best of all, this is conveyed perfectly through dialogue, action, and sometimes thought. O’Brian doesn’t describe his characters to the reader. He shows the reader exactly who they are, and it’s something I wish more authors could do with such perfection.

This was an easy book to get lost in, but isn’t what I’d call an easy read. I think I have a reasonably respectable vocabulary, but I found myself looking up numerous words as I went along: roborative, sempiternal, epicene, concatenation, and the delightful crapulous to name a few. It also demands a certain level of engagement and intelligence from the reader–O’Brian doesn’t stop to explain things. Latin and French phrases are thrown about without explanation, and the author never does anything so gauche as to point at something funny; if the reader fails to see the humour in a particular passage, that is their problem and their loss. There were certain passages I read a couple of times, sensing I was missing something, but alas I was not always up to the task of figuring it out.

Overall this was wonderfully immersive and left me wanting much more of Aubrey & Maturin and life at sea. The back of my copy states that O’Brian’s portrayal of life aboard a Nelsonic man-of-war is “faultless” and that his power of characterisation is “masterly” and I could not agree more. ...more "

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(57%)
"I only finished this series a little over a year ago, but here we are again. It’s just so perfect I could not resist the allure to dive back in again. And after 20 books my memory of the first is somewhat dim, so it’s exciting to rediscover it as if for the first time." — Oct 25, 2026 02:52PM

Jul 09, 2024 04:49PM · see review