Reviews and Comments

This was the best book I read all year. It completely seduced me--its charms reveal themselves slowly and quietly. I found myself not wanting to let these characters go by the end of the book. Fantastic.

So...I'm gradually working through the Dune books, and this was the first one that really felt like a slog. All of the books require a certain amount of faith, that this prophecy you've never heard of until now will somehow become important later, or that these six characters referenced in this conversation will make an appearance later, or whatever, but this was the first one where it just felt like chapters and chapters went by in which I had little sense of what anyone's actual aims or motivations were. Leto II refers to the "Golden Path" throughout the book as his primary driving motivation, but exactly what that was remained unclear until the closing pages. The book retains the incredible scope and mythology of the previous installments, but that scope feels like it's starting to weigh the whole enterprise down.

This was a fairly light, breezy read that suddenly starts to hit hard in the last few essays. The end of this collection feels like an almost entirely different work, and I sorta wished that more of the rest of the book had that same tone. All that aside, the last quarter of the book or so is fantastic.