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Recent reading
I am behindhand on writing up books, but here are two of them:
Mr Midshipman Hornblower by C S Forester (1950)
Continued naval adventures! Or rather, the beginning of them. Baby!Hornblower has more adventures than twenty midshipmen are likely to have. This book felt more episodic to me than many of the other ones, but I still enjoyed it a lot. The rice cargo! The rescue mission while on parole! Etc. Also, he has reason to be miserable on that first ship, but I feel like not everyone would respond to it by trying to commit suicide by duel...and then his attempt to also duel the captain, which is quickly put down, as it deserves. I haven’t seen him duelling in other books, so it looks like he took that advice to heart.
The Threefold Tie by Aster Glenn Gray (2020)
A 19th century m/m/f romance set in the US, with a prior relationship between two men who had fought in the Civil War together, and then one of them gets married. I enjoyed this, it has a lot of warmth and engaging storytelling! I liked the structure, with more of the backstory revealed as we went along. It was great to get glimpses of the characters' prior awareness of different relationship models--the past was not homogenous, yay! I wished the book was longer--but I can't quite tell whether this is because it actually needed to be longer, or if I'm just greedy? I did think the ending was a little abrupt; I’d have liked to see more of how their relationship played out.
Mr Midshipman Hornblower by C S Forester (1950)
Continued naval adventures! Or rather, the beginning of them. Baby!Hornblower has more adventures than twenty midshipmen are likely to have. This book felt more episodic to me than many of the other ones, but I still enjoyed it a lot. The rice cargo! The rescue mission while on parole! Etc. Also, he has reason to be miserable on that first ship, but I feel like not everyone would respond to it by trying to commit suicide by duel...and then his attempt to also duel the captain, which is quickly put down, as it deserves. I haven’t seen him duelling in other books, so it looks like he took that advice to heart.
The Threefold Tie by Aster Glenn Gray (2020)
A 19th century m/m/f romance set in the US, with a prior relationship between two men who had fought in the Civil War together, and then one of them gets married. I enjoyed this, it has a lot of warmth and engaging storytelling! I liked the structure, with more of the backstory revealed as we went along. It was great to get glimpses of the characters' prior awareness of different relationship models--the past was not homogenous, yay! I wished the book was longer--but I can't quite tell whether this is because it actually needed to be longer, or if I'm just greedy? I did think the ending was a little abrupt; I’d have liked to see more of how their relationship played out.
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Re Midshipman being episodic -- yeah, Midshipman and Admiral in the West Indies are episodic, with Commodore and A Ship of the Line strongly trending that way, too. But these novels were all serialized for their original publication, so most of them really do subdivide into discrete episodes that can be read as more-or-less stand-alones. If you step back, Hotspur tended that way, too: most chapters were discrete, only-loosely-related incidents during the two years Hornblower commanded the Hotspur.
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I didn't think about Hotspur also being episodic, but you're right, it is. I think it felt less so because there is more character continuity.
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