Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Digging Into Dune

I've always shied away from reading sci-fi. Even movies like Lord Of The Rings get me nervous - what with not only a cast of characters to learn, but different worlds and species as well. I took a chance though on Dune by Frank Herbert.

At first my concerns were well founded. There are 18 CDs in the book. It opens with an introduction of the cast - not single author - who will be acting out the book. Then the clincher - this is just Book 1 they tell me. Gulp. How many books are we talking about?

Things got scarier from there as quotes from an alien religious text is read and the story begins.

As I feared, new species, worlds, and concepts were being introduce by the minute.

I'm now on disk 6. I have to say that I absolutely love the book. I love it for the reasons I like most books: the characters are ones I like and can learn from and the storyline is quite interesting. There's enough action to keep my attention too.

The book clearly has a soap opera quality to it. Try this experiment one day when you are home sick - watch an episode of Days Of Our Lives. Within 3 minutes they will drop enough clues that you'll be totally up to speed. By the end of an episode, you'll be a pro.

Same with Dune. While the book invents new science, history, religion, politics, warcraft and entertainment for an alternate set of worlds and creatures it does so in a way that you can indeed follow along with.

I'm glad I took a chance on this one - it's already paid off.

--Ben

2 comments:

  1. Definitely a great book but hard to get through when actually reading. But on CD it was great. I actually listened to this book a little over year ago. It was great, eventually I need to get the sequels and listen to those as well. I should probably go and join the Arlington Library now that we live here.

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  2. Did you notice how the actor who read the Duke's part kept changing from disk to disk? Man that's annoying. I wouldn't normally care, but I happen to like one of the actors better than the others.

    Heck yeah you better get an Arlington Library card. That's more important than cable, phone and possibly internet service. :-).

    Thanks for the encouragement!

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