Welcome to my Aubrey-Maturin Series Commentary page!

As I mentioned previously in one of my blog posts, I've been meaning to do a full re-read of the Aubrey-Maturin novel series while highlighting my favorite bits and giving my own commentary on the excerpts. If I'm honest, it's mostly an excuse to take passages out of context and do mental gymnastics to interpret them in ways that support my favorite ship in the series, which is, in fact, not a boat at all (har har har).

But in all seriousness, please take my commentary here with a grain of salt--- Most of the time I do state that I'm skewing the text from its original meaning to suit my Jack/Stephen slash agenda, but if you have read (or plan to read) the actual books, keep in mind that I do know that a lot of what I include (---and don't include!) here is not nearly as shippy as I make it out to be.

I think you can enjoy my commentary without having read the books, if for some reason you just like reading me ramble about things I enjoy, but I really recommend that you do check out the books, or at the very least watch the 2003 movie adaptation, Master and Commander: At The Far Side Of The World. It's a great movie! That being said, though, if you are planning on eventually reading these novels, you should know that I will be spoiling major plot points and speaking as if you already have full context/knowledge of the plot of each book.

Finally, please also forgive me if I lapse into a writing style that takes on some of the verbosity and somewhat antiquated narrative voice of the original text... Unfortunately it sort of comes with the territory of reading a period piece novel for hours at a time. I naturally end up picking up quirks of the language used in the books.

Oh, and I've edited some of the passages I quote for clarity/brevity. For example, if an excerpt of dialogue doesn't have dialogue tags, I'll pop in a "[said Jack]" just to make it clear who's speaking, or in narration I'll swap out a "he" for a "[Stephen]" or a "his" for a "[Jack's]" and things like that, along with cutting superfluous or irrelevant bits with "[...]". Standard stuff. (And I promise I haven't edited down the quotes enough to completely misrepresent what was written originally!)

Without further ado, go ahead and select a book's title to go to its page of commentary!

BOOK ONE: Master And Commander

BOOK TWO: Post Captain

BOOK THREE: HMS Surprise (Coming soon!)