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arbieroo

Arbie's Unoriginally Titled Book Blog

It's a blog! Mainly of book reviews.

Currently reading

Station Zero
Philip Reeve
Progress: 220/282 pages
The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition
Ursula K. Le Guin, Charles Vess
Progress: 749/997 pages
The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry
Robert Chandler
The Uncertain Land and Other Poems
Patrick O'Brian
Progress: 8/160 pages
The Heptameron (Penguin Classics)
Marguerite de Navarre
Progress: 152/544 pages
The Poems and Plays of John Masefield
John Masefield
Progress: 78/534 pages
Poems Selected
Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes
Progress: 4/50 pages
Selected Poems
U A Fanthorpe
Progress: 18/160 pages
The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse
Mick Imlah, Robert Crawford
Hainish Novels & Stories, Vol. 2
Ursula K. Le Guin
Progress: 133/789 pages

The Wine Dark Sea, Patrick O'Brian

The Wine-Dark Sea (Aubrey/Maturin, #16) - Patrick O'Brian

As I stagger past the 3/4 mark of this enormous series of books I am struck by the observation that I am more interested in Maturin than Aubrey. Really though, it's being more interested in what's going on on land than on ship - which is the complete opposite of what I would have said in the first quarter of the series. The descriptions of sea life and action aren't bad - the prose is excellent - it's just that there have been so many of them that familiarity is breeding tedium. That said, the opening, with it's wine-dark sea, is something new.

 

With only four books to go, I will no doubt eventually finish this series but I wonder if O'Brian's collected works would have been better over-all if he had quit at say, book 10, and done something else for his later books.