- DUNE
- by Frank Herbert
- [rated by PBS readers as #35]
- 704 pages
I decided to tackle another of my extra big books, as it was at the end of the year and I was ahead of schedule.
Read about a hundred pages and then put it aside. I had to be in the hospital and recouping afterward for the majority of December, so I made myself a deal to only read stuff I liked!
It isn’t that anything about the writing of this is bad. It is clearly a production designer’s wet dream, to recreate this different Universe. I admire the details of that. It’s like the Stephen King book way back there. To create an entire fictional world is an amazing feat. I couldn’t do it.
But my problem with sci fi like this is a simple one. There are good guys and there are bad guys. And I got tired of black and white portrayals like that a long time ago. Also, the plot line of who is going to kill who.
Picking it back up, I realize that it is more than that. Picking up my wet dream theory of earlier, this is a guy’s book, through and through. Okay, okay. I’m sure you can find 100 women on the planet who love this shit to distraction. And I generally don’t like women’s books!
But really. Fights in big sand torrents, with huge worms being the enemy? Whoever heard of a girl who would wrap her arms around a plot with huge worms as the enemy? With big lines uttered like, “run, you sand dogs!”
Sigh. I’ll read it. And perhaps by the end, I’ll love it. More likely, I may grow to admire it. But sheesh. It sure wasn’t written for the likes of me.
DONE.
WOW!! Wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow.
To paraphrase Gloria Gaynor, I have survived.
I have survived the greatest threat to this little project so far. The reading of Dune.
Now, I don’t really find fault in Dune. There is just no part of its demographic that I coincide with. I’m not interested in it and I never would have been.
It is a big battle book, ending with one fight between two rivals for the galaxy. It is just so boy! The characters are good or bad. That’s it. The only suspense the good guys have is when they sense their own weakness, but not because they ever doubt their moral rectitude. They are righteous and they will win.
Yawn. Sorry Dune fans but yawn.
But I made it. It took me two months and numerous other books for distraction but I returned to try again. I gave myself 20 pages at a time.
I’m glad to finish it. I literally can’t wait to pick the next title. It may be great, it may be drekky but there is one thing it will most assuredly have going for it…
IT WON’T BE DUNE!
I read DUNE 400 years ago and remember being blown away by the beginning of it, the philosophy, the world, whatever— enough to power through it. Although i suspect it was a long slog in parts for me too. And you’re right! It IS a boy book. But I’ve long since known I am at heart a 14-year old boy in the body of — currently — a 67-year old woman.
I have never read it, nor seen the movie. Like you, not big on sci fi. But you DID have more tortuous books in the past from your descriptions, you must have purposely forgotten, ha ha ha. Remember Gulliver’s Travels or Moby Dick? (or was it the Old Man and the Sea?) Anyway, I admire your fortitude in tackling those huge books that are dry and difficult and finishing them!