You must log in or register to comment.
Weirdly, I found both incredibly difficult to get into reading, but when it finally clicked, absolutely worth it.
I started Dune probably 30+ times and read 5-15 pages, then got distracted and moved on. I kept trying it, because people whose taste I trust kept recommending it to me. Eventually, I got hooked, then read the entire book before going to bed that night. Fellowship was about the same.
I don’t know what exactly made these so hard to get into, because I have no problem with Herman Melville, for example.
I read dune when I was 14 and though it required taking notes (vocab lookups mostly) I tore through it in a couple days. Then a year later I re-read it and holy shit, there were all kinds of things I didn’t pick up on. Read it again when I was 24 and there were whole subplots I found (tho this was after reading all the FH books).
All this is to say: great books deliver multiple messages if you take the time to read them, then pause to reflect on what the author is saying. And I recommend his other stuff, especially the Dosadi Experiment (WILD PREMISE for a protagonist!), it’s sequel Whipping Star, and (unrelated) The White Plague, they’re worth your time. Probably. I don’t know how much time you have. But they’re rather good.
man I’d love to get Tolkien and Herbert ripped and ask them lots of strange questions about the lore of their shit.
I remember that as a teen, the one thing i loved about Dune is that Herbert hated the Hero’s journey. And lord of the rings is the only example of the Hero’s journey I can stomach, maybe because the weight of the narrative feels very distributed among all the characters of the fellowship.
If only we could learn to read again … but alas, it is beyond our power
Okay, you need to go to long form for sci fi these days.
Foundation in particular is full of great visuals. The Expanse, while gritty, was claustrophobic in the way the Orc caves were in LotR. Hell, even Andor was great. Add a few more like For All Mankind, which is like if old popular mechanics magazines were real… There’s beautiful stuff out there.
But what if I want funny, but I’ve watched futurama a million times
have you read the Hitchhiker’s Guide and the series? because goddamn that shit is funny as fuck if you take the time to comprehend it. A perfect example: Ford Prefect is named after a shitty car because they assumed cars were the dominant form of life because of all the energy and infrastructure we lavished on them. AFAIK it never explains the name in the book lol. You’re just supposed to know UK motor trends from the mid 20th century.
another suggestion but a bit more cerebral than Douglas Adams - the Baroque Cycle trilogy has a character called Half Cock Jack Shaftoe, who genuinely has some of the funniest fucking adventures/escapades I’ve read in ages. Literal laugh out loud cackling madly shit. And his progeny in Cryptonomicon gets the same treatment, two of the funniest characters ever written.
another suggestion more recent: dungeon crawler carl is the purest popcorn mainline gamers/scifi/fantasy readers will encounter, it’s over the top and all the way around back to the start but it really works quite well. I was skeptical but enjoyed it thoroughly.
