Grand unified books thread

[Barrister]

I really enjoyed that.

I has made me feel I could possibly enjoy an O'Brien book and get through the pages of naval terminology

Read volume II first.  Almost all set on land.

Personally I thought the jargon that had to do with direction of the wind relative to the ship and adversary important  because it aided understanding of Aubrey's decision making. Sailing by and large, reaching, etc. Jargon relating to ship furniture, I don't care what a  euphroe is.

O'Brien was reasonably smart about it - he had Maturin as (amongst other roles) as the reader's stand-in, so many nautical details would thus be explained both to Maturin and to us.  So certainly important details as to the course of the battle would be made clear.  But all the talk of the rigging (which no doubt would be of key importance to the captain) really is nothing more than background information.

I enjoy Volume 2 (Post Captain) in part precisely because it's largely set on land, and in fact sets up a lot of the personal drama that will wind up being important for the remaining 18 books - but let's also be clear a lot of the fun of the books is the swashbuckling action scenes too.  Post Captain is a Jane Austen novel set from the male perspective for the most part.

[Sheilbh]

So tracking books I've read this year.

Finally finished The Catholic School by Edoardo Albinati. The black hole at the heart of this book is the kidnapping and rape of two working class girls and the murder of one of them by three privileged boys who attended the same prestigious private Catholic school as the author. This story is almost literally in the middle of the 1,200+ page novel. The rest is almost essayistic examinations of Italian society: that Catholic school, that neighbourhood in Rome, the bourgeois society the boys came from, fascism, the Years of Lead, Italian society (especially patriarchy) more generally, criminality. I think, though, it's less than the sum of its parts - the essayistic chapters and the auto-fiction don't really cohere. You can see what the book is trying to do (and I am someone who is really interested in post-war Italy), there's moments where I felt there was a real flash of insight but I don't think it worked and in a way I think it was overwhelmed by the scale of the crime its about and how you approach that as a novelist and how Albinati attempts to "interpret" it.

Nathaiel's Nutmeg by Giles Milton. Frankly a bit pointless, very light history of early days of the East India Company and its competition with the Dutch for spices. But I don't think there's a central story told well, or much analysis. It's only 20 years old but shows its age. And ultimately it's hard to think that the story its telling particularly matters. I have another Milton book on my shelves which I might take to the charity shop because I don't think he's for me.

[Sheilbh]

About half-way through the Booker list and just finished Claire Messud's This Strange Eventful History which was fantastic. So far my favourite, also liked Percival Everett's James and Hisham Matar's My Friends. It starts about the French family, in June 1940, the kids and wife having got back home to Algeria while the father, naval attache in Thessaloniki/Salonica. It then follows that family over the next seventy years, each part skipping forward ten years as they all move through the world and world moves around them. In a way a novel about a world that no longer exists even as it's moving closer to us - but at heart just brilliantly observed characters and the dense layers of love (mostly) in a family.

I enjoyed the winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, but not my favourite. So far though, sadly not a great list.