January to something like June, and worth it

I have wanted to read this since I was about nineteen, when a man in a pub told me I would love it. He was right, more or less, only forty years late.

At my rate a book like this stops being a story you follow and becomes a place you visit. I would be on Arrakis for ten minutes before the lamp went off, and then again the following night, and after a few months the desert felt like somewhere I had actually been. The stillsuits. The sand walk. The way water works out there, and spitting being a courtesy. All of that came through perfectly well.

What did not come through was the politics. There are a great many houses and a great many schemes, and I would take in a page of it, sleep on it, and lose most of it by the morning. I stopped trying to keep the Landsraad and the Guild and the rest of it straight somewhere around February and simply let it wash over me. That is my method with a lot of books now, if I'm honest, and I don't enjoy them any less for it.

The Baron is horrible in a way that has aged oddly. Jessica is the one I cared about, and I don't think the book quite knows that she is the best thing in it.

Eight. Slow going, but I was never once tempted to give it up, and at my speed that counts for a great deal.