Read the Novels and Forget Everything Else

I loved the Peter Weir adaptation and was always hopeful there would be more, particularly with that ending leaving it open like that. I picked up the first book recently so that I could read through it on vacation. I do tend to agree with Jan Morris in that only people who knew the author have reason to care about his personal life. Of course there are limits, and given the author has been dead for 26 years and the events he is accused of happened 70+ years ago, O'Brian can no longer atone for his past misdeeds. I'm not certain if knowing that O'Brian was a horrible family man will change my enjoyment of the first book, but that remains to be seen. I may not even get through reading it due to other factors, anyway.

I was curious if his family ever wrote about him and his son Richard Russ did in below article. I think this gives a good insight into how his son felt about his father, and particularly how his mother felt until her death.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/28/fiction.film

Excellent books, full of understated spectacle and really excellent wordplay. If you get into them you may want to pick up "A Sea of Words" as a guide to some of the more esoteric terminology. Pretty much guaranteed you'll be stumped quite a few times in every book.

Good reminder.

As a percentage, most of my 'reading' has been outputs of frontier AI models. Need to increase my ratio of consuming human-written and human-produced text. Sometimes I fear drifting away from the 'core reality' of everyday life here in the US Midwest given how much I use AI.

[removed] made the mistake of assuming the contents of the article before reading it. My comment does not apply.