5 posts tagged “books”

It's a long weekend here in Canada, and I took this afternoon off to add to it.  I'm catching the train to Belleville later this afternoon t go and join my friends D & R at their cottage for the long weekend.  Real downtime!

This is the view from their back deck, where I sit and watch bunnies and birdies and chipmunks and rest my urban eyes on refreshing fractal images instead of rectilinear ones for a few days.

It may look grayer and damper than this, since it's not predicted to be a sunny weekend, but it's still time away, with D feeding me fine stuff (she's chef-trained) and both of them thinking I'm a great guest because I don't expect them to entertain me. 

Speaking of decks, my kid sister provided me with these at the Mother's Day get-together.

Yes, the next seven books in the seafaring Aubrey/Maturin series, of which I've already plowed through one and a half since Sunday. I'm tempted to bring several and do nothing but read all weekend, but I'm also mindful of the great expanse of writing time the cottage offers, so I'll be working on the new novel, too.  And rewarding myself with virtual turns upon the quarterdeck with Jack and Stephen. 

We have all the conveniences up there except internet, so I won't see you peeps on Vox till sometime Monday.  Take care!

I've lately been racing through the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin novels at a great rate of knots.  There are 21 books in the series (the last unfinished, because O'Brian died), and I just finished #11 this weekend.  My kid sister has loaned me a good number of them, and the library has supplied the ones she doesn't have, or the ones I needed before I saw her next.  But I am becalmed!  While the library copies have been readily available (as long as I leave a couple of days' lead time for them to arrive at my nearest branch for pickup), all of a sudden, #12 (The Letter of Marque, for those of you keeping score) has two holds on it ahead of me!  And I'm not due to see my sister till Mother's Day!  I made up for it earlier this week by watching the movie Master and Commander:  The Far Side of the World (made loosely from books 1 and 10), which I always thought was a thumping good movie even before I read the books.  I watched it on VHS in the bedroom, where I only have a VCR, during my long, sickly lie-in, thankful I'd hung onto my taped copy after I got the DVD with some birthday money last year.

This weekend I'm off to my friends' cottage and I thought I'd bring the DVD and maybe watch the extras quietly on my laptop and get my fix without disturbing my friends while it rains all day Saturday and we're loafing around.  Since I have to pack tonight, and I was thinking of it this morning, I decided to haul it out of the bookshelf and lay it out ready to pack.

But no!  It's gone!  I've run aground!  Nowhere could I find it!  Now, I don't have that many DVDs that I can overlook one among the hundreds, or dozens even.  Apart from Arrested Development, multitudinous Harry Potters and Pirates of the Caribbeans and a couple of seasons each of Chef! and West Wing, there isn't a lot else there. 

Damn and blast!  Someone's grog is getting stopped for this.

Here's a postcard I picked up last May at the Opera Garnier in Paris.  It's a photo of an exhibition of costumes on the grand staircase in the front lobby.  Because of the costuming, I thought of Aubrey.  And because it's opera, I think of Brownamazon, too.  It's taken me this long to remember to take it to my friend's place to get it scanned.

This is an oil painting by Roger Desoutter, just one off on a card I picked up at a card store.

I'm big on the naval stuff right now, because I'm well into Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series and have gotten really caught up in it (up to book 6 now). 

The other book I'm reading now is this:

It's a thin book I got for Christmas, photo essay with short pieces about the various feral cats in a colony in a US city, with text by the woman who manages the colony.  Though this is right in line with my feral cat work (and I've thought about writing a non-fiction work about my feralanthropy), I can't read more than a page or two at a time.  It's weird, instead of feeling all enthusiastic about what this woman and I have done, I get all overwhelmed by the fact that each of us has only cleaned up one tiny corner of the feral cat world, and there's no way to get to all of it.

1.Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag 5 different people.

BrownAmazon tagged me, and I must have got halfway down the page in my book before I got to the fifth sentence.  And then I was confused -- start at the fifth sentence, or the next sentence?  Anyway, here it is:

"Yes, sir," said Stephen.  "I have only this to say:  in the event of the capture of St Paul's, it is of the first political consequence that the inhabitants should be well treated.  Any looting, rape or disorderly conduct would have the most prejudicial effect upon the political ends in view."

The book is #4 in the Aubrey/Maturin seagoing series by Patrick O'Brian, Mauritius Command.  I was hoping it would be a passage full of natuical terms and maneuvers, because the book is jam-packed with them, and I don't have a clue what any of them mean. 

I tag Aubrey (I don't remember if anyone else has tagged her, because she reads very interesting historical stuff), Lauri, Drude, Kirk and Jay, if they feel like playing.