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Books: More Hornblower!
Aug. 16th, 2008 02:56 pmThe Hornblower books are great fun, perfect light reading for an airplane or to bring along on a vacation, especially on a ship! So, mostly on the airplane, I read Hornblower and the Hotspur and Hornblower During the Crisis, and started in on Hornblower and the Atropos, which I'm still reading.
The Hotspur one was a lot of fun. It's interesting to compare the novels both to my fuzzy memories of the A&E series and to the two more-recently-encountered radio theater series (we listened to both of them about a year ago). It was also very entertaining to have the story told from Hornblower's point-of-view so that he get his perspective on Bush, whereas the last one was told from Bush's point-of-view.
The Crisis ended very suddenly, just as it was about to get very exciting, and wrapped up with a page of author's notes. I hadn't realized the novel was incomplete! It had been a very satisfying read up until then, dealing more with political intrigue in the Admiralty than the others so far. Forester has a way of writing so that, without the narrator going too far outside Hornblower's head, the reader can still recognize things going on that Hornblower himself isn't aware of, like people's reactions to what he says and does. It was packaged with a couple of short stories, which were quite entertaining.
The Hotspur one was a lot of fun. It's interesting to compare the novels both to my fuzzy memories of the A&E series and to the two more-recently-encountered radio theater series (we listened to both of them about a year ago). It was also very entertaining to have the story told from Hornblower's point-of-view so that he get his perspective on Bush, whereas the last one was told from Bush's point-of-view.
The Crisis ended very suddenly, just as it was about to get very exciting, and wrapped up with a page of author's notes. I hadn't realized the novel was incomplete! It had been a very satisfying read up until then, dealing more with political intrigue in the Admiralty than the others so far. Forester has a way of writing so that, without the narrator going too far outside Hornblower's head, the reader can still recognize things going on that Hornblower himself isn't aware of, like people's reactions to what he says and does. It was packaged with a couple of short stories, which were quite entertaining.
