Patrick O'Brian

[smith8273]

W.E.B. Griffin is great. His series about the Marines pretty much checks all the boxes the OP asks for...

It's called The Corps Series. His style is kind of like 'Forrest Gump,' where he picks one character, and everything happens to that character.

I also read the Badge of Honor, (Philly cops) excellent!!!

Now on Presidential Agent series, so-so — my guess it it's ghost written by his son.

Another voyaging book that I think is a must-read is 'This thing of Darkness' by Harry Thompson. it's about the voyage of the Beagle with Fitzroy, Darwin and all. Excellent!!!

[Woodland Hills]

Originally Posted by Jdeuel

I’d recommend for round four, you try the audiobook version. Incredible narration by Patrick Tull.

This!!!!!!


There is nothing better for long road trips.....

[roverhi]

Another Dewey Lambdin fan. Good sailing adventures with a little social history and sex thrown in.

What is amazing about O'Brien is his amazingly thorough knowledge of 1800's fighting ships while he had virtually no idea of the reality of being at sea. http://www.latitude38.com/features/O%27Brian.htm

[Kolanorton]

Out of the full Aubrey–Maturin series, Desolation Island was my favorite.
Some of his back-story i have come across...

Patrick O'Brian (1914 2000). After the front page of the New York Times Book Review (Jan 6th.1991) called the series "the best historical novels ever written," within two years 400,000 books were sold. Booksellers also reported, there was almost as many women buying O'Brian books as men.
He lived in the ROUSSILLON region, at the southernmost edge of France. A patchwork of ancient vineyards blanketing the foothills of the Pyrenees.

For more than four decades: he and his wife Mary (ex wife of Russian-born nobleman Count Dimitri Tolstoy) owned a hillside vineyard, small enough to work themselves, but large enough to provide an adequate supply of the region's full-bodied red wine.
When sleep eluded him, O'Brian would leave their modest Mediterranean-style house and drive high up into the hills, parks his car and walk for hours. That is when so much of what he wrote the following day came to him.
A compact, austere man, face deeply lined, his gait slow, as one would expect of someone in their late 70's in 1998. But his pale, watchful eyes are clear and alert, like those of a young and vigorous bird of prey.
More than one visitor, upon meeting him for the first time, felt a frisson of recognition, surely here is Dr. Maturin himself, alive and well.

Like Maturin, O'Brian is exceedingly formal and polite; there is the same precise language and the familiar erudition on all matters natural and literary, a long walk in his company becomes a master class in botany, viniculture, zoology and ornithology.

Unlike Stephen or Jack however, O'Brian does not play an instrument but is found of strong coffee, books, and red wine with his meals.
Until recently, he refused all interviews.
He deflects direct inquiries about his private life, and when asked why he moved to the south of France after World War II, he stops and fixes his interrogator with a cold stare. "That seems to be getting rather close to a personal question," he says softly, walking on...

Born in 1914 into an Irish family of some distinction, there seem to have been French lessons, books, horses, travel, fox hunting and a governess, but by the Great Depression years his family had fallen on hard times.
His mother died when he was a child, and a lung illness, which troubled him into adulthood, sometimes kept him at home, where he was privately tutored.

He has been a sailor most of his life; sea air was often the recommended cure for his illness.
A relative owned a two-ton sloop, and other friends had boats. But best of all, a family friend owned a ocean-going bark-rigged merchantman, which offered him the opportunity to "hand, reef and steer" in the old manner.

A peripatetic education, including a time at the Sorbonne, was grounded in the natural sciences and the classics. Speaking French, moderate Irish, Catalan, Spanish and Italian and also like Stephen he knew Latin.

Though he spent time in England, as his stepmother was English, he felt that he was formed, as Maturin was by Ireland and France.

Rejected for active army service in WWII, he drove ambulances in London during the blitz, then spent the rest of the war serving in an intelligence unit connected with the French Resistance.

When war ended he refused the post of third secretary to the Paris embassy, resolving to be a writer.
Since 1949, O'Brian has lived by his pen alone, producing 21 novels, several volumes of short stories, a biography of the 18th-century naturalist Joseph Banks, who along with the young Charles Darwin is an obvious model for Maturin's scientific bent. An illuminating book on Picasso, and when necessary, translations, including works by de Beauvoir and Colette.

O'Brian's perfect manners and impressive erudition can be intimidating. "A novelist must know everything about his time," he says, meaning in his case the 18th century. He has not merely researched that world but prefers it and wherever possible lives it. "I know their politics inside out, but I can't tell you who is in the Cabinet here right now."

He was old enough to recall a time when horses and carriages were still seen on the streets of London and Dublin.

He wrote in a long cool gallery blasted out of the bedrock beneath his home. But during the summer months, when tourists on the coast made too much of a din, he moved to a small stone building, what the Catalans call a casot, high up in the hills.

He and his wife have shared their one-bedroom home within sight of the sea for half a lifetime.

The acceleration in his popularity after 1991 had little noticeable effect on their lives. An ancient Citroen was replaced with a sportier model, but in all other respects they both continued to live in ascetic simplicity.
The death of his wife Mary in March 1998 was a tremendous blow to him, a shock he never recovered from.
In his near fifty years in Collioure, few of his neighbors realized that the silver-haired gentleman in their midst, was a famous author.

[Papasail]

Thank you for a peek into O’Brian’s life… his gift for storytelling, his cunning and exquisitely sharp use of the english language, was seconded only by his incredible seamanship vocabulary…. I would call his ability, literally, “historic”. Where else can you see, to the finest detail, history in action?!?Just incredible. Laser focused, indeed.

*Been enjoying Foraster’s “Horatio Hornblower” series: the dvd series won several awards. Hard not to.

B

[Papasail]

My suggestion, which is ghastly (that’s a bit tongue in cheek ,
is to read H.P. Lovecraft, the grandfather of horror….

* I say this, because he is the only other author I’ve ever read, beyond O’Brian, that combined such exquisite detail, within such incredibly focused description. What crawled under your skin was not fuzzy, or open to interpretation….
it was not a cheap, confused, blurry, or handheld shakey cinematic camera trick. It was NOT an easy jump-scare, for effect…

… before T.V., before crowded theatres with friends along, and oversalted, buttery popcorn… back in the 1930’s, there was just you, on a frost-chill night. And a dead book. You lit a single candle for vacant illumination, and it whispered smoke to-and-fro through an achingly quiet ship. A place familiar, whose older noises slowly began to conspire against you in the dank despair of a conjuring that held you breathless. The sensorium of being alone with yourself.

And something otherwise….

each page fluttered lightly, trembling, stirring something not of your kin, awake. It arrived page by page - it took it’s good time, whispered macabre fates directly to you. It even smiled at you. And from places hidden deep within the ancient recesses of the cosmos…
it thoughtfully, provocatively, and wryly, welcomed you in….
into a place forelorn, that was not welcoming at all.

H.P. Lovecraft made his case plain, in living f’ing technicolor. You knew precisely what the slow inexorable creak of the companionway stairs meant. With Lovecraft, Horror crept in, wings folded, with knowledge afore sight.

[s/v Jedi]

Thanks for pulling this thread out of the depths of the forum

So here is my, actually serious recommendation: Dune, by Frank Herbert.

If love for the PoB series goes beyond “reading about boats” into the literature quality, depth and detail and even history, then Dune opens up whole new levels.

In fact, while reading it the second time, it has become my favorite book.

Edit: and don’t skip Isaac Asimov who is a master of depth and detail.

[Jamme]

Originally Posted by Kolanorton

. . .Born in 1914 into an Irish family of some distinction. . .
. . .He has been a sailor most of his life. . .

Alas I’m afraid both statements have been proven incorrect. His personal life, however, does not and should not impact our love for his great novels.

[Papasail]

Originally Posted by s/v Jedi

Thanks for pulling this thread out of the depths of the forum

So here is my, actually serious recommendation: Dune, by Frank Herbert.

If love for the PoB series goes beyond “reading about boats” into the literature quality, depth and detail and even history, then Dune opens up whole new levels.

In fact, while reading it the second time, it has become my favorite book.

Edit: and don’t skip Isaac Asimov who is a master of depth and detail.

Thanks for the shoutout to the *Dune Trilogy! Long has it been my top SciFi read… it might sound nutty, but the first time I read Dune, not only did the author put me right in the middle of Arakis, but (for me), I felt I could literally smell the melange of the spice: that has never happened to me again. The movie attempts in the past have all been laughable. But this new release (a masterpiece).

Ender’s Game is outstanding, but ratchets up even more after the trilogy, with the introduction of Bean.

For your love of SciFi, do yourself a BIG favor, and read “The Year’s Best Science Fiction Short Stories,” as edited by Gardener Dozois.
I’ve read some astoundingly good works/ Hugo & Nebula award winners…. and even SciFi (poetry)(one of the best things I’ve read ~ever~). Beloved Gardener has sadly passed away, but encouraged many a budding writer to keep faith with themselves over the course of this 30 year series…. lots and lots of gold to be mined. A plausable case for the devil using time within the theory of relativity; dinosaur’s ghosts who strangely inhabit a japanese village; an accident of nanosites, a lovely couple transition through transcendance into a (city) within the confines of their own apartment; a goldfish that becomes self aware.
SciFi is a place where soft pillows and lucid dreams meet up with the Gods of odyssey.

[JebLostInSpace]

I've got to disagree with those recommending the Dewey Lambdin series. I found that his grasp of the mechanics of sailing was so lacking that it became hard to read after the high quality of PoB. He makes some really very basic errors when describing some of the ships' maneuvers. I also personally found that his methods of putting his characters into real events was a bit ham-fisted, especially compared with PoB's masterful intertwining of real actions, real quotes, etc.

What Lambdin does do well is give us a better look at the land side of the Napoleonic Wars. I got the (uninformed) impression reading his series that Lambdin was probably a pretty good historical scholar in terms of how that war was fought on land, but that he had little notion of sailing, even less of Age of Sail sailing, and even less of high quality character writing.

Sorry to his fans up thread from me, I just happen to disagree and thought I'd share my perspective.

I would recommend another Marryat work, who was also mentioned up thread. I'm halfway through Peter Simple now, and enjoying it immensely. Reading the fictionalized account written by someone who was actually there brings a whole new perspective to the genre.

Stepping out of the historical fiction and sailing genre, I'd highly recommend The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. It has the grand journey aspect that we love in PoB's works, and I loved the writing style. It's a quick read, but one that stuck with me and I think about it often in my everyday life.

Lastly, I only recently became aware of PoB's other works outside of Aubrey-Maturin. He's written several other novels and a couple of biographies that I'm planning to try next!