There are few things less interesting to me than the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars era - I don't do Napoleon, ships, the ocean, or the early 1800s in general. All that has been excepted for Patrick O'Brian's masterwork, the Aubrey-Maturin series. Few writers have the pure, unassailable talent that O'Brian had, and fewer still managed to keep the genius flowing for 20 books over 30 years.
I was not really interested in the series myself, so I understand if you don't run out to buy a copy of Master and Commander, the first. Nonetheless, you must do so. Let me be clear about this: damn the overwhelming tide of nautical terms, these books are some of the best literature ever written in the history of humanity. Not only that, but they are a lot of fun to read.
The series is really about the friendship of Captain Aubrey and his ship surgeon, the esteemed physician Maturin. It has been said that the series is not really a set of 20 books, but rather one book with 20 installments, and I agree. The development of these characters is fascinating and highly enjoyable, and written with a master's skill at describing people and the situations we get ourselves into sometimes. While Aubrey advances up the Naval ranks and Maturin spies for the British government, and wars rage around them, you are drawn into their personal dramas like an old friend. The era is presented in excruciating detail, and written about so convincingly that you will swear you lived there once. O'Brian's romance with the Navy does get technical at times, and you will definitely find yourself damn good and lost in some of the descriptions of ship life, but the writing is so engaging that you accept it as a matter of course. Eventually (by about the fourth book) you will go out and hunt down the book that tells you what all those terms mean, and then the book that shows all the maps of their adventures, and then the book that gives you the recipes for Spotted Dick and Plum Duff. O'Brian has been called a cross between Jane Austin and Horatio Hornblower, and quite frankly, that's not a bad comparison. His work will surely stand the test of time.
