Arbie's Unoriginally Titled Book Blog
It's a blog! Mainly of book reviews.
Currently reading
The Hundred Days, Patrick O'Brian
It's been a while and I'd forgotten about O'Brian's delicious prose. Delicious prose like ice-cream that's full of flavour and goes down smoothly. Prose that makes a statement. Makes a statement then repeats it, expanding upon it. Prose that really is way harder to imitiate than it looks...
It was a bit of a shock to find Aubrey and Maturin had not only escaped the magically extended 1812 (authors are the gods of their creations and can do anything) but had arrived in 1815 without any apparent intervening time. And they're off to North Africa for political shenanigans and anti-Napoleonic naval action.
There are some surprises here and new destinations, amazing for book 19 of a series that's circum-navigated the globe several times over - this is neither the best nor the worst entry and if you've got this far, surely you both know what to expect and are going to stick it out through the 20th and final book...