Jamie's comments (member since Feb 18, 2009)

Jamie's comments from the The Gunroom group.

The audiobooks read by Patrick Tull are unabridged.

I've listened to a couple of them, and I like hearing the proper pronunciation of the nautical terminology and the French (except when Jack speaks it, of course) but I think the humor comes across better on the written page.

I'm impressed that he's giving it away for free. There's a similar compendium, organized alphabetically, for sale called Persons, Animals, Ships and Cannon in the Aubrey-Maturin Sea Novels of Patrick O'Brian.

Maybe everyone else already knows about this, but I only recently ran across this very cool reference document for the Aubrey/Maturin series, which can be downloaded free as a .pdf file from http://www.patrickobrian.com/butchersbill.htm.

It's a listing of statistics for the series. For each book it tallies injuries, deaths, actions, prizes taken, duels, etc. It also lists the crew complement for each ship as well as every character met or mentioned in the book.

I knew that some variation of the phrase "There is not a moment to lose" was used quite a lot in the series (170 times) but I had not picked up on the fact that Aubrey so often says "There you are!" when he sees Maturin (65 times).

I hope Bettany changes his mind. I saw the movie before I read the books, and despite O'Brian's strenuous efforts to convince me that Stephen is small and reptilian with a grating voice, he persistently looks and sounds like Paul Bettany in my mind.

Russell Crowe says he's considering reprising his role as Jack Aubrey in a new movie based mostly on The Reverse of the Medal. Link.

I wanted to recommend this collection of sailor songs that was inspired by the Aubrey-Maturin novels.

After seeing the movie Master & Commander I went looking for a copy of Don't Forget Your Old Shipmate, the song they sang at the table, and found this terrific CD.

Here's the website, or you can find it on Amazon.
http://cdbaby.com/cd/jerrybryant1