Relief from Dune

[grubbybastard]

I finally read the original Dune series last year, at the prompting of littlepinch, which was excellent and which I quite enjoyed. I proceeded on to reading the (first six) prequels written by Herbert's son and another author, of which the first three (set directly before the original six) were mediocre and next three (set even further in the past) were mind

Comments

[rwbadger]

I LOVE when a book sucks me in. I've been struggling through Sister Carrie and Mrs. Dalloway for a while now. I feel it a sense of duty being an English lit grad student.

[die7fox]

Brian Herbert inherited not a drop of his father's literary talent. Don't waste your time on any of his other books.

[grubbybastard]

NOW you tell me. :p

[fredo_joaquin]

I got halfway through House Atreides and refused to go any further. I have actually not gotten rid of the books (to the free market or to a used book store or donation pile) as I am actually considering putting it in the recycle bin, IT WAS THAT FUCKING BAD.

I loved the Dune series, having first read it in probably 6th or 7th grade. Brian totally pimped out his father's legacy with horrible writing. The back story could have been genius (Rev. Mother Mohiam giving Baron Harkonnen the flesh-distorting disease when he sexually assaulted her was brilliant) but the writing was just horrible. Boo.

[grubbybastard]

The second trilogy of prequels almost completely lacked good ideas, as well as having the bad writing. Just horrible.

[strawberysblond]

You're making me so happy I stuck to the series and never touched the prequels. I confess I've never been much into sequels/prequels/etc written by anyone other than the original author.

[rwbadger]

Don't tease us like that! What's the title?

[dirigibles]

Dune is my all-time favorite book, and Dune Messiah and Children of Dune were pretty good. But I found the next two kind of difficult to read, and I never even got to Chapterhouse.

Of course, this was years ago; maybe I should reexamine them.

[grubbybastard]

littlepinch and I were able to agree on the fact that the original six books were not of equal caliber, that one or two of them were pretty bad but that you had to read them to understand what came later, and that the sixth book made getting through the bad ones worthwhile.

We did disagree on which ones were the bad ones, though. :)