Tell me your top 10 books
Have you been watering the garden of your mind?
I finished this last night. What a travesty to the series. It's tiresome to trudge through some chapters. Most of the story feels forthcoming of a great idea about the woes being an all knowing polymath through paradoxes that manage to fall flat and eventually lead around in another chapter repeating the same tiresome phlegm present in the previous book(s). Overall it just felt like it missed the mark of where the first Dune created the landscape this one invariably reversed and tried to expand by letting the political paradoxes and word play run endlessly amok. 6/10 - would rather smash my toes than reread the sterile poorly done discussions.
The previous book I read was It's Me Eddie, by Eddie Limonov. Quite a vulgar book showing what a trained literary glob could do without the alcohol that had sunk Bukowski. It was a breathe of fresh air to my stagnant brain at the time. Certain repetitive events near the end would have worked better had they been condensed further towards the middle of the story rather than adding to the mounting display of neurosis I believe the character was sufficiently displaying. 8/10 - would definitely reread this charming book.
I've never understood why people like "Dune". Probably you need to be a boomer whose teenage years fell on 60's. But even back then there were some great sci-fi authors like Asimov, Clarke, Simak etc. (I won't cite Heinlein because out of all his books I like only the "Starship Troopers".)
I tried to read it in both Russian and English, but the result is always the same - the language is flat and lifeless, the characters fail to gather not even sympathy from me, but basic empathy, the setting outright sucks ass. It's a space opera that takes itself unbearably seriously - and for a space opera it is an unforgivable sin. If you take monarchies, and knights, and kings and queens and palaces - and put it all IN SPACE - you're not a genius and this is not the best shit ever. It's a wacky setting for goofing around. "Star Wars" understands it about itself. It knows that it's just a children's playground, a place for innocent games that will be remembered with warm nostalgia by adults. "Dune" thinks it's a fucking new Bible. But a freaking Bible has more nuance, and may Allah forgive me for uttering these words, gray morality in it. "Dune" revels in it's white and black morality. On one hand we have Atreides - a family of heroes and just lords, each of them being noble, wise and has a thirty cm cock. On the other hand we have Harkonnen - who are evil, promote slavery, evil, treacherous, evil, brutal, evil, violent, evil, lustful and evil. Also gay. There's also the Freemen (got the pun? huh? huh? jeesus I'm so smart - thought the author to himself), who check every mark on the "noble savage" list, and so badass that they can beat the emperor's own elite troops. And the main hero? Oh, he's like 15 - and he's so smart he's almost a genius; he's a prince in one of the space lords families; he learned magic from his sorceress mother; who's so cool he instantly gets the respect of the noble savages who elect him as their leader; so badass he can beat savage warriors who can beat emperor's own elite troops; he's also a promised Messiah that's destined to defeat the evil empire, get a harem of girls and rule the universe. In other words, he's Marty Stu. Asimov's "Foundation" shits all over this infantile drivel. The only "mature" theme in the book is the praise of the drug use by the author. The "spice" doesn't have any harm (well, except for turning you into a fish if you go overboard), and it would make you live longer, think faster etc. etc.
May be it was the "Blindsight" of its time. But I just don't see the appeal. And it's not just the "Dune", I tried to read some other novels by Herbert and I was equally repulsed. Here's a plot for one of the books - a private detective gets hired to investigate a disappearance of a star, and the said star is an intelligent being and it turned into a human body and this body was kidnapped by some rich crazy woman that would whip the star with a lash because she's a sadist who can't stand inflicting pain on living creatures but the star cannot feel pain. That's the plot I shit you not. Sounds like a bad dream, or, to be honest, like a bad trip - but was written and printed and read by millions. My opinion is that Herbert was just a bad writer and a possible drug user.
All of the above is, of course, my personal, completely subjective, opinion.
Fairly accurate approach about Herbert's slow, stale, stagnant prose.
To excuse myself why I chose to read the series, I was shanghaied by popular opinion to read the novel, believing it was a pinnacle of older sci-fi books. What a mistake that was, but I feel compelled to abuse myself further and finish Heretics of Dune and chapterhouse Dune so that I can brag about masochistically finishing the series.
Have you read any of his son's continuations? From what I understand, they're all cheap cash ins swiveling around the momentum his father created all in the expense of sacrificing key plot lines, lore and laying waste to essentially everything that made the first few good books. I think Herbert really did have a hatred about libertine machiavels he worked with or encountered in his readings, but I deeply enjoyed the first book because of how vulgar it brought them into light. That and I enjoyed the world building around the Freemen.
