The tattered rags like raven wings in motion, his hammer hand upon the bedroom door

Finally, finally, my brain works. For more than a fortnight now, I have been trying to figure out what faint echo flickered in my mind at the recognition scene between Will Turner and Bootstrap Bill in Dead Man's Chest; because there was an immediate parallel that slipped out of reach as soon as I recalled it, and it's been driving me up the wall. Lying here, listening to the storm, I've finally remembered. It's a passage from Greer Gilman's Moonwise (1991), a foreshadowing of Jack Daw.

(Cut for mythscape prose and, if people still care about that sort of thing, I'm sure a spoiler or two.)
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Will you choose winter or summer? Will you walk with friends or alone?

So I'm pleasantly surprised: I read Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon yesterday, and liked it well enough that I have just returned from the bookstore with Throne of Jade. Yes, yes, I'm behind the times; everyone else has read these already; I needed something to read while curled up in bed, all right? And it was much, much less like Anne McCaffrey than I'd feared.

I suspect that I can't appreciate the books fully, since my knowledge of Patrick O'Brian and C.S. Forester is nonexistent, unless one counts Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, but I am fond of the slightly archaic style and the alternate natural history is very neatly worked in. Of course, I couldn't reconstruct even the real-world Napoleonic Wars if I was hit with a treatise on them, so I can't tell whether any striking political-military changes have taken place (beyond the basic existence of the Aerial Corps, which I'm very sure I would have remembered), but I don't think that's critical to the plot as yet. I am enjoying the ways in which the mythology of dragons has been tinkered with. History? History's flexible. But if someone botches the myth . . .

I probably should have saved myself the trouble and bought Black Powder War this afternoon, but this way I can at least pretend that I am exercising self-restraint.