Dune
If you look back over my blog, you'll notice that in late June and
early July I read 12 books. This is a lot, even by my standards (and
even considering that half of them were graphic novels). But within the
first few pages of Frank Herbert's Dune, I knew I wanted to take
my time with this book. It was clear that this book was dense and I'd
need to slow down to really understand what was going on. This was
driven home by the fact that I needed to reread the first 30 pages a few
times before I felt like I had a good grasp of the characters and which
ones were important.
I'm really glad I took my time with this book. It was excellent, and I enjoyed spreading the experience of reading it out over several weeks. I'm not sure I'll read any of the sequels, but I do expect to come back to this one again.
I loved that each conversation included the thoughts of the various participants. It painted a complete picture of who knew what and what they planned to do with that information. It also made certain events seem both inevitable and uncertain, which tied in nicely with Paul's prescient abilities. He was clearly going to unite the Fremen and seek revenge on the Baron, but the way he did it was interesting.
There were a few times in the book when the law of narrative causality made events more obvious than they perhaps should have been. As soon as the Duke decided to stop lying to Jessica, I knew he'd be dead in a couple of pages. And everything we knew about Paul and Feyd-Rautha made it inevitable that Feyd-Rautha would try unsuccessfully to poison Paul in their final fight. But these obvious plot points didn't detract from my overall enjoyment of the book.
There was just so much going on. The book painted a huge collision of politics, economics, and religion, and showed how they can affect each other subtly and not-so-subtly. It also did a good job of handling everyone's competing motivations and showing how those create rifts that may or may not be healed.
I'm really glad I finally got around to Dune. It was a breath of fresh air after the disappointment of Stranger in a Strange Land and managed to restore my faith that classics are classics for a reason. This one definitely deserves the awards it has won.
I'm really glad I took my time with this book. It was excellent, and I enjoyed spreading the experience of reading it out over several weeks. I'm not sure I'll read any of the sequels, but I do expect to come back to this one again.
I loved that each conversation included the thoughts of the various participants. It painted a complete picture of who knew what and what they planned to do with that information. It also made certain events seem both inevitable and uncertain, which tied in nicely with Paul's prescient abilities. He was clearly going to unite the Fremen and seek revenge on the Baron, but the way he did it was interesting.
There were a few times in the book when the law of narrative causality made events more obvious than they perhaps should have been. As soon as the Duke decided to stop lying to Jessica, I knew he'd be dead in a couple of pages. And everything we knew about Paul and Feyd-Rautha made it inevitable that Feyd-Rautha would try unsuccessfully to poison Paul in their final fight. But these obvious plot points didn't detract from my overall enjoyment of the book.
There was just so much going on. The book painted a huge collision of politics, economics, and religion, and showed how they can affect each other subtly and not-so-subtly. It also did a good job of handling everyone's competing motivations and showing how those create rifts that may or may not be healed.
I'm really glad I finally got around to Dune. It was a breath of fresh air after the disappointment of Stranger in a Strange Land and managed to restore my faith that classics are classics for a reason. This one definitely deserves the awards it has won.
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