You say you don’t like historical fiction? You say descriptions of technical nautical details bore you silly? You say if you wanted to read a novel with turn-of-the-19th-century dialogue you’d read Jane Austen?

Fie, I say. And possibly pshaw. I'm here to tell you why you should consider reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, and in order to keep myself from going on ad nauseum, I'm going to do it in list form.

1.  The writing is, in a word, elegant. Yes, it’s very old-fashioned and there’s not an overabundance of contractions, but there’s a love of language that veritably bursts out of every page. It’s beautifully complex but never sacrifices clarity.

2. Jack’s penchant for bad puns and Stephen’s tendency to fall overboard. These aspects of their characters are some of the funniest moments in the series, but there aren’t so many of them they become tired jokes.

3. Jack Aubrey. He’s big, blond, heavily scarred, and overly fond of wine, women, and any kind of suet pudding. He’s also tough yet reasonable, fearless without being reckless, not always overly insightful but never outright stupid (unless there’s a woman involved), and very much a man of his time.

4. Stephen Maturin.  In hands less able than O’Brian’s it would have been easy to have a physician of the era seem brilliant by embodying modern medicine. Stephen is brilliant, but not because he’s advocating medical practices 200 years before their time – in fact his lack of medical hygiene is often extremely cringe-worthy.

5. It’s the most appealing friendship in fiction. As unlikely a pair as they are, there’s never a moment that Jack and Stephen’s mutual affection isn’t completely believable.

6. All the secondary characters are very nearly as good. Preserved Killick, Jack’s long-time steward, is the best character Dickens never wrote.

7. Sheer narrative and storytelling skill. Both dialogue and description are used so skillfully that nautical and historical details are imparted along with characterization so that no word is wasted and almost every sentence does triple duty: advancing the story, building characters, and imparting information.

8. Gotta love the descriptions of food and wines. So many people do, in fact, that the series spawned an authorized cookbook, “Lobscouse and Spotted Dog: Which It’s a Gastronomic Companion to the Aubrey/Maturin Novels,” by Anne Chotzinoff Grossman and Lisa Grossman Thomas. In it you can learn to make such things as inedible turtle and rats in onion sauce (as well as many other dishes that actually sound tasty).

If you’re still not convinced, rent “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.” I know, that’s cheating, and I’m not saying it’s completely true to the books but it’s enough to give you a fairly accurate taste of the main characters that might just get you reading long enough to get hooked. I’m not above such a tactic if it works.