I’ve owned a copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune for a long time. It’s a science fiction classic. It heavily influenced George Lucas and Star Wars. As a child I had a Dune poster from the original movie in my room that I got out of a cereal box (despite not seeing the movie). I felt like I was just waiting to read it and have a new series to love.
And then last week, I finally read it.
And I found myself wondering what I was missing. Parts of the book engaged me, yes, but others dragged. It was well-written, obviously. But my personal enjoyment of it was hovering around “meh” for most of the book. I didn’t connect with any of the characters, and found I most liked one that died near the beginning. As per ush.
But I just couldn’t DNF it. It was Dune for pete’s sake. DUNE!! You can’t DNF Dune! And part of me is glad I finished just so I can say, I read it and this is what I thought of it. But when considering making the most of my precious precious reading time, I probably should have once I figured out this wasn’t the next Lord of the Rings for me. I wish it was. Really I do. But I did learn an important lesson this week, and that is that I still have a long way to go on this journey. And maybe someday I won’t balk at DNFing a classic.
Week 6 Update
So first off, the digital book I won on Fable, the one where there was a message saying I had won it, about a week later switched to a “sample” and I got an email saying I hadn’t won it. Not sure what happened there, but I took the book off my TBR (I might read it later, but not adding it now).
I also got a book from the library in order to complete a Goodreads challenge. So that was no gain or loss.
And I received the new Natalie Jenner, Austen at Sea, which I had pre-ordered like a year ago. So that increased my TBR.
I read three books this week (plus the library book, which didn’t count in the numbers) and DNF’d one other book. This brought me down under 600 books!
These are the books I read:
Dune by Frank Herbert – Science Fiction: (kind of) Worth It
Rating after 50 pages: 3 stars
Final rating: 3.5 stars
Clear by Carys Davies – Historical Fiction: Not Worth It
Rating after 50 pages: 3 stars
Final rating: 1 star
Dawn of Avalon by Anna Elliott – Fantasy: Not Worth It (unless you’ve read any of the other books in the series)
Rating after 50 pages: 3 stars
Final rating: 3 stars
Austen at Sea by Natalie Jenner – Historical Fiction: Worth It!
Rating after 50 pages: 4 stars
Final rating: 4 stars
And this is the book I DNFd:
And until next week, happy reading!