My new love!!

Friday night Harry took his Sunday School class to the temple. I had a fairly vigorous p/t session. Then I hit Baja Fresh for a solitary dinner - I ate and read - kind of like - well, kind of like nothing I usually do - how often do I eat out alone?? But I enjoyed myself anyway!

I'm so in love with the new library, that I checked out the remainder of the HH books instead of buying them. This volume contains Beat to Quarters, Ship of the Line and Flying Colours. This last one was especially compelling reading. I was talking out loud - at home anyway - and gesticulating and cheering and guessing what was going to happen!! Let me give you a taste, well, this isn't a taste of the action or the plot, but one of the things I'm loving about the novels is the character development.

"Those days on the Loire were pleasant, and every day was more pleasant than the one preceding. For Hornblower there was not merely the passive pleasure of a fortnight's picnic, but there was the far more active one of comradelines of it all. During his ten years as a captain his natural shyness had reinforced the restrictions surrounding his position, and had driven him more and more in upon himself until he had grown unconscious of his aching need for human companionship." (This is when Hornblower, Bush and Brown have escaped from the clutches of Napoleon's henchmen - they steal a boat and escape down the river, with the help of a displaced nobleman and his daughter-in-law.)


Of course I smiled at this one,

"There was the pageantry of the Loire - Gien with is chateau-fortress high on its terraces, and Sully with its vast rounded bastions, and Chateau-Neuf-sur-Loire, and Jargeau. Then for miles along the river they were in sight of the gaunt square towers of the cathedral of Orelans - Orleans was one of the few towns with an extensive river front, past which they had to drift unobtrusively and with special care at its diffiuclt bridges. Orleans was hardly out of sight before they reached Beaugency with its interminable bridge of countless arches and it's strange square tower."

Maybe you have to be a Terrill - or at least have read The Cat and the Devil by James Joyce.

Now I'm at the point where Horatio is in Russia with the Czar Alexander - but it is so gripping that I have a hard time putting it down!

Kyle Mc at work says he's not enjoying the dvd's as much as he enjoyed the novels - he said he read them in college - and what he doesn't like is that the character development in the movies is not the same as in the books. Since I did it the other way around, saw the films, then read the books, I have just found myself fitting the movie images to the words.

Either way I'm in hog heaven!!

P.S. Dad and I watched the 1951 Hornblower movie with Gregory Peck - we thought it might be stilted and cheesy - but it wasn't. It had combined details from 4 or 5 of the novels and just plugged them in - and it worked.