"Dune" by Frank Herbert

I love science fiction (especially sci fi movies), but I admit that it's not usually the first genre that I pick up to read.  I remember reading Jules Verne and H.G. Wells books when I was growing up, but I later found that a lot of science fiction novels get bogged down in too much science and don't have enough fiction.  One sci fi book that I had heard of (being a classic and very famous and having a movie based on it) was "Dune".

My husband recently read "Dune", and asked me to read it as well so that we could discuss it.  So I did.

The beginning of "Dune" is very slow.  If it weren't for my husband's encouragement I don't think I'd have stuck it out past the first 50 pages.  Eventually the story does get moving, but it remains a very slow-tempered book.  Somehow even when there are major events happening and lots of action, it manages to keep plodding along at the same pace (often skimming over events rather than really describing them, but spending lots of space and detail on other things).  There's a lot of info to take in about the world and universe of "Dune", and a lot of characters. 

Overall, the story itself is interesting, and you do feel somehow compelled to find out what happens.  The book "Dune" as a whole, though, is actually kind of boring.  There are only so many times, for example, that we can read that the people were obsessed with moisture/water and lived in a desert full of sand.  I wish there had been less telling and more showing.  (For example, rather than telling us for the 500th time that it was dry, show us that the characters get nosebleeds/cracked lips/dry skin/etc. from their arid surroundings.)

If you do read this book, I recommend having someone else to discuss it with.  For me, the best part of reading "Dune" was discussing it afterward.

There are lots of things in the book that are hard to visualize or should be visually impressive, so I'm interested to watch the movie of "Dune" and see how it interprets the book and shows things (especially the Worms and Fremen sietch).