WHAT have you finished reading recently? I finished a Fellowship of the Ring radio adaptation, but I don’t know if that counts…..so there’s also Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. I know I need to review it, but I’m so very sick of thinking about monetary policy. (It showed up in my Carter, Roosevelt, and Reagan books!)
WHAT are you reading now? Reagan: The Life by H.W. Brands is my lunchtime read, and I’m more than halfway through. It’s extremely detailed. Also technically reading Into the Planet, a memoir of a cave-diver.
WHAT are you reading next? I need something fun. Yesterday I received an email that after a year and a half, I was finally next up to read Dune: Messiah. So, it’s possible I will begin that in advance of SF Month 2026.
Do you mean you have been on your library wait list for 18 months for Dune??
Last #book I finished: What Mad Universe, by #FredricBrown
#Amreading: Infinite Wisdom, by #ThomasRWeaver
#Amlistening to: Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by #LauraSpinney (on #Protoindoeuropean)
#TBR Reading next: #Maigret et son mort, by #GeorgesSimenon
Dune Messiah, yep! The release of the Dune movies created a huge interest in the books, I think. If I’d WANTED to read it I could have bought a used copy before now, but it wasn’t a huge priority.
Proto sounds all kinds of fascinating!
I need to progress my Dune reading. ‘Children of Dune’ will be next – when I can fit it in! Just about to finish a novel based in Israel (adding to my fictional World Tour) before moving on to the End of the World (kind of…).
The end of the world as in the poles?
… as in the End Times…. [grin] Although I do have a bunch of books with ‘snow’ in the title scheduled for a Winter read…
Ahh, it’s the end of the world as we know it..by the way, read something from Paul Kingsnorth this morning you might like:
“These are strange times; disturbing at some very primeval level. Sometimes it’s like being stuck inside a twentieth-century pulp sci-fi novel. I’ve long wondered whether the Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley took inspiration from those novels, either consciously or otherwise. I suppose the AIs have been trained on them too, which gives rise to an intriguing thought: are these machines acting out the plots of those novels, by accident or design? If so, which ones are they reading?”
GOOD quote… and good questions too. Life does seem to be imitating SF right now. Its almost like playing topic bingo when a news headline pops up & I think – oh, I read that in novel ‘x’ in the 1980s… [lol]
Will this be your first read of Dune Messiah? If so, you should probably get Children of Dune soon after so as not to lose the tempo of the story.
It will be my first attempt, yes. It took me 2-3 tries to really get moving with the original Dune.
Oh.
Good luck then. You’re going to need it if you had trouble with the original 🙂
The problem with Dune was being dropped in the middle of things. Since Messiah is a continuation, I fancy it might be easier..
Just a warning – ‘Dune Messiah’ starts around 20 years *after* ‘Dune’ – so be aware of the time jump going in! The time jumps get wider after that…