Thought I might as well warn you right in the title. If you’re not of the Patrick O’Brian, uh, persuasion, you might want to skip this post. ;)

So, I finally got around to joining The Gunroom — the Patrick O’Brian fan mailing list that’s been going on for a decade or so. Holy cow! These people are amazing! I thought css-discuss was a high-volume mailing list with its 50 or so messages a day, but The Gunroom easily gets over a hundred. And except when they’re punning and teasing each other (occupations which are also true to the POB spirit, by the way; if you don’t believe me, ask me why the short watches on a ship are called the dog watches, heh heh) — as I say, except when they are joking around, these hundred or so messages a day comprise detailed and deep discussions of every aspect of these books you could possibly think of. Everything from in-depth character analyses with plenty of supporting quotes from the texts, to historical research on how many lieutenants would actually have been allowed aboard a ship of the Surprise’s size. And the discussion is liberally peppered with POBisms, e.g. beginning sentences with “Which” or “Not as who should say” or ending them with “for all love” or “the creature.” Which I am mostly just lurking in awe over there, and loving every minute.

One of the recent discussions had to do with the various different audio versions of the Canon. (That’s what they call it, the Canon.) They were comparing different narrators and discussing something which I have also wondered about, namely, how strong was Stephen’s Irish accent? On the one hand, his speech is full of Irish idiom, but on the other hand it often happens that other characters don’t realize he is Irish. Is it because his accent is too subtle? Or because the characters who insult the Irish to his face are just clueless? Anyway, the end result of this discussion was that I went to the library and got me the audio version of Post Captain, narrated by the late great Patrick Tull.

As you may remember, I’m not a big fan of audio books. I don’t process aural information very well. I’m very visually-oriented and I need to see it to comprehend it. Listening, my mind wanders all over the place. And I can tell you for sure that if I hadn’t already read the book several several times I would not be enjoying this at all. But since I have already read the book several several times, well, I am loving it on tape. For one thing, even though I’m not very aural, I do like to know how things are pronounced. I’ve made some interesting discoveries. Like, topgallant isn’t pronounced top gallant; it’s t’gallant. I am on the edge of my seat waiting to hear him pronounce the name Heneage (Hen-ee-idge? Hen-idge? Heen-idge? Hen-eedge?). And I’m even more on the edge of my seat waiting to hear him utter the creaking sound that passes for Stephen’s laughter. :)

This is probably the only video I will ever embed in this blog. Here’s Patrick Tull reading the great climactic scene from Reverse of the Medal. Get your hanky ready.