Delightful reading

H.M.S. Surprise, Patrick O'Brian. This might perhaps make a good sequel to the "Master and Commander" movie. So far, there's death, sailing, politics, sailing, unpaid debt, sailing, 3rd world squalor, sailing, you get the drift. Despite any peons sung to O'Brian's work, he has a bizarre way of his character's speech sliding straight from A into B without warning or explanation. As an example of his delightful style, a description of Stephen's about a dinner he had just attended with Jack, who had noticed the women sitting near Stephen:

“The nymphs in green? Delightful girls.”

“It is clear you have been a great while at sea to call those sandy-haired coarse-featured pimply short-necked thick-fingered vulgar-minded lubricious blockhead by such a name. Nymphs, forsooth. If they were nymphs, they must have had their being in a tolerably rank and stagnant pool: the wench on my left had an ill breath, and turning for relief I found her sister had a worse; and the upper garment of neither was free from reproach. Worse lay below, I make no doubt. ‘La, sister,’ cries the one to the other, breathing across me - vile teeth; and ‘la, sister’, cries the other. I have no notion of two sisters wearing the same clothes, the same flaunting meretricious gawds, the same tortured Gorgon curls low over their brutish criminal foreheads: it bespeaks a superfetation of vulgarity, both innate and studiously acquired. And when I think that their teeming loins will people the East ... Pray pour me out another cup of coffee.”

The ellipsis is O'Brian's. Just "teeming loins" to "I'll have another cup of coffee, thanks".