I feel like I’m not reading much at all, but I guess I am getting through a few pages after all. Reading is often the most selfish activity (apart from blogging?), so I feel like I need to steal minutes here and there for it. Those days when I take the bus to work instead of bicycling, I treasure the 30 minutes of reading time, even as I miss the slight exercise of the commute. Fortunately, the Aubrey-Maturin novels are of reasonable length, and I keep chipping away at them. I almost dread getting to the end of the volumes.
Patrick O’Brian’s The Reverse of the Medal is the eleventh in the series, and the first where more time is spent on land than sea. Aubrey, as foolish as ever on land, is given a stock tip (peace is imminent, therefore the market will rise), and he follows through on it. More importantly, he is not discreet, and shares his tip — which is fraudulent — with his father and his cohorts. After the market rights itself from the fraud, Aubrey becomes embroiled in a trial. The political target is his father, a Radical, but his father has wisely fled, so Aubrey — innocent of all but foolish trust in the justice of civil courts — stands trial and is convicted. While the penalty in this case is not imprisonment, Aubrey is removed from the Royal Navy as a result. While most of the book is spent chasing Maturin around London trying to avoid, and then soften, the inevitable outcome, it’s clear that for Aubrey, nothing could be worse than being stripped of his rank and place in the Navy that is his home. This installment ends with Maturin buying the Surprise, their long-time ship now being sold out of the Navy, as a privateer, with Aubrey to command. So begins an interlude of naval action, without the Navy… but that’s in the next book.