I can begin this review by reporting, to my infinite satisfaction, that I was right about Maria Hornblower, née Mason. (Slow down truckers and out of towners! Don’t you know death lies below?) Our clearly unworthy heroine. It is clearly impossible to appreciate fully the drama and heroism of the Horatio Hornblower novels while at the helm of one’s own vehicle! Hornblower belongs to stolen, quiet afternoons on the couch or the late hours past one’s bedtime and should not have to compete for the reader’s attention with the agonies of Baton Rouge traffic or horror and indignation at the recklessness of Texas drivers on the Atchafalaya bridge. Reading Hornblower in print is a very different experience to listening to it in the car - in fact, it is so drastically different that I’m ashamed to have ever chosen the audio books over their print version and, even more so, to have ever complained even once about the books dragging or containing too much historical detail. After so much fun listening to the audio book versions of the the first two installments of the Hornblower saga, imagine my disappointment at learning that the third book, Hornblower and the ‘Hotspur,’ also read by Christopher Radeska, was unavailable in audiobook form! Have no fear, gentle reader! Happily, my father had the entire Hornblower collection stowed away in his study, stacked on a shelf behind an even larger stash of Patrick O’Brien novels.
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