Now that school is out for the summer (cue–Alice Cooper) I needed a project to keep me busy. I had wanted to reread Dune and when I saw that a YouTuber that I follow was organizing a read along in June (called Dune in June!), that was all of the motivation that I needed. The read along provided a suggested schedule (around 18 pages per day) and promised several essays to highlight their gleanings from the book, along with a regular schedule of zoom calls for subscribers.
I knew that I would probably not follow their schedule, nor participate in the zoom calls. But that’s just me. I would read the essays AFTER I had finished the relevant sections of the book.
My main purpose in the rereading was to uncover philosophical ideas. I’ve read quite a few articles that claim that Dune is a “not to be missed” jewel of philosophical science fiction….but in my previous readings I really hadn’t noticed much of that. Maybe my focussed rereading would uncover them.
Book in hand, pen and common place notebook ready, I started sometime in late May. I actually didn’t finish until early July since I had picked up a bad cold in mid-to-late June and that really affected my overall schedule, including my reading schedule.
Initial Comments
- The book was first published in 1965
- My edition of the book is 604 pages (without counting the Appendices)
- Broadly speaking, the book is divided into three parts.
- Without giving away any spoilers, I found the first half of the book to be more interesting than the second half. To me, the first half is more action oriented, while the second half is more psychological.
- I harvested 9 pages of notes, complete with the the associated page numbers. My intent is to eventually convert at least some of these into essays or mini-essays, which I might include in this blog.
- In looking through my notes, I’m seeing the following broad themes
- Observations on leadership, and organizational behavior
- Some new words, which I’ll need to add to my personal dictionary
- Aphorisms that apply to many segments of Life, including virtue
- Examples of Beautiful Language
- Observations on governments, and politics
- Oblique references to other ideas that I’m familiar with. A good example is there is a minor character in the book named Turok. In the early 1990’s there was a comic called Turok Dinosaur Hunter
- Observations on how economies work
- Comments on physical addictions
What about the essays promised in the read along? I didn’t find them that useful. As Edmund Wilson wrote in “The Triple Thinkers“: In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.”
This means that even though we all read the same text, we experience different books.
We also need to be careful that we are uncovering ideas and not just searching for symbolism that might not exist.
“There isn’t any symbolism in The Old Man and The Sea. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is s***.” (Ernest Hemingway-Letter to Bernard Berenson-September 13, 1952)