Amongst the books I picked up at the library the other day was Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, by C.S. Forester. My father, when I was growing up, had something of a fetish for maritime museums and adventures. Patrick O'Brien, C.S. Forester, the U.S.S. Constellation at Baltimore's Inner Harbor. The sea and its lore were pretty much the bane of my childhood existence. I can't tell you how many times we were drug aboard some ship to satisfy my father's penchant for all things nautical.
When I first bought the book, I wasn't sure if it were something I'd read before. After finishing it, I'm pretty sure I haven't. All in all, it's a pretty passable book. Pretty formulaic. Nothing too exciting (or mayhap I'm simply past the age when I find such stories exciting.) Which may be funny, as I still take the time to reread Latham's Carry On, Mr. Bowditch at least once a year. It could be argued, though, that neither of these stories are really books about the sea. That's just the setting. Forester's Hornblower is all about pluck, courage, and duty, Bowditch is about perseverance and the integrity to follow up on what is correct.
Reading this book reminds me of my time working at an estate auction company growing up. We used to go and clean out houses in Southeast Pennsylvania after the owners had died and sell the contents at auction. A lot of my early exposure to reading came from box lots of books that I'd pick up for a dollar or two a pop. That tended to be a lot of Irving Stone, Herman Wouk, Michener, and Reader's Digest condensed classics (and you could probably do some sort of anthropological survey based solely on the 20-50 books that your average suburban household in the U.S. carries. I can't begin to tell you how much overlap there was between a lot of those bookshelves. How many copies of How to Win Friends and Influence People or The Power of Positive Thinking do you think have ended up in landfills in Southeast PA over the past 20 years?)
While the book is the first book chronologically in the series, it's the sixth published. As it is, I'm not sure I have much desire to follow it through. Then again, for a book that took me four hours to read, it probably wouldn't take much to breeze through the rest.
