Mark Tiller asks: > Okay, so who's Patrick O'Brian (says he preparing to be flamed) Author of a series of naval adventures featuring british officer Jack Aubrey and his friend and companion, MD and naturalist Stephen Maturin. They're mostly set in the Napoleonic Era, and are both rollicking good adventure stories and and a wonderfully detailed and enjoyable way to learn about the naval life of the period. There are 20 or 21; I've just finished the last after saving it for a year or so. The books aren't without flaws; for one thing, there's no way they could have made all the voyages they did within the time frame they had. And if you read them too close together, they can get a bit repetitious. But the stories are good, the characters are excellent, the writing is clear and clean, and all in all it's huge fun. I've never seen any of them in standard paperback, you'll have to pop for trade paper or hardcover (or used, I suppose). You *will* want to read them in order, and they're all still in print. Also worth chasing down are several of the companion books. Mine are out on loan at the moment, so I can only describe them generally here. One is a set of maps detailing most of the first 16 books, the other is a dictionary and glossary of terms used in the books. Both were written by devoted fans of the series; my apologies for not being more precise. O'Brien also wrote 'Men-of-War: Life in Nelson's Navy'. It's rather short but well worth the price for the illustrations. Most of them are gorgeous paintings of various ships, encounters, etc, as painted by various folks of the era. It also contains one of the most *frustrating* bits of history I've ever read -- the story of two ships in a 24-hour engagement that included multiple ramming and (at one point) the two ships tied together with the few surviving crew firing point-blank broadsides into each other. O'Brien describes it all in a few paragraphs; I'd have loved to see him describe the whole thing in the same detail given to the engagements in Aubrey and Maturin. -- "The faster you go DEAF the more time you have to READ." edu-core heavy-metal band Bloodhag <http://www.bloodhag.com>