2025 Readings 102

 In this year of reading I've mentioned those books which somehow existed parallel to me, sometimes for decades, that I somehow never got around to reading. That is, there are those books that you seem to have always known about, and sometimes even considered reading, but somehow never got around to it for any number of reasons. Yesterday I finished one of those books: Frank Herbert's Dune.  Why had I never read Dune?  I'm not actually a big science fiction reader, so it's not that strange all things considered. However, I know that at various times over the last four decades I've owned at least one copy of Dune, which stared at me forlornly from a bookcase while I ignored it, before it somehow disappeared, shrapnel from some relationship breakup.  Recently my son encouraged me to give it a look, although in this case a listen, as he sung the praises of an audiobook version he had just finished. We were having lunch at the Langdon Street Pub, and I think I looked it up on the spot and purchased it. I liked it a lot, both the recording and the story itself. The Islamic/Arabic subtext, both its role in the novels and its disappearance in the films, was something I had heard about, but I was still surprised by the number of instances that these concepts shaped the text. These ranged from borrowing a book title from Ibn Khaldun to concepts such as jihad. I was somewhat disappointed in his portrayal of jihad, because he definitely falls back upon the idea of the "lesser jihad" while mainly ignoring the more idea of the "greater jihad." That is, he made greater use of the concept of jihad as conquest while ignoring the much more essential aspect of the internal personal struggle to do the right thing. Still, it made for a very interesting reading, and made me more than a bit appalled that the film versions always duck it altogether and rely upon stereotypical portrayals of Arabs. The religion he creates is a combination of Islam and Buddhism, which, as I've discussed in other places on this blog, I don't actually find that strange of a concept. Anyway, I enjoyed Dune, and have already uploaded Dune Messiah, the second volume. I can't imagine that I'll make my way through all six of the Dune novels that Herbert himself wrote, let alone the mountain of related books that his son produced, but I'm looking forward to at least one more.