Dune

Analog Magazine serialized Frank Herbert's Dune in five issues beginning January 1965. That means I was thirteen years old when I read it. By the time the May issue brought the conclusion of the saga, Dune had taken its place as " Best Book I've Ever Read"--supplanting Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, which I had read when I was eleven or twelve. Rereading Dune fifty years later, I wonder what I got from the book. Those first one hundred pages, building to the assassination of Paul's father (which is foretold on about page three), are something of a slog. I can't imagine I was wrapped up in the intriguing that Herbert lays out in such detail, with so much of the dialog followed by the italicized thoughts of each character. And at the time I wouldn't have known that giant worms and desert adventure was on its way. I've read that Herbert reworked the text for novel itself, and perhaps some of what I found tedious in the recent re-read was in the shorter two-part serial that Analog published in December -- ;January, 1963--'64. Returning to the book, I found it a heavy-handed and dour read. I suspect that was a rather dour thirteen-year-old, and of course there were the giant worms.