Another month seems to have disappeared at light speed. This time, the most significant thing for me personally was finally catching Covid-19 :(. Got to experience most of the milder symptoms for a couple of days. But thankfully beyond a bit of residual tiredness that has been about it since.
Before that though, there was the very nice Easter week with lovely weather and visitors! As usual for much of the week Norway more or less shut down, so we spent a lot of time outdoors. The ice cover that has since completely disappeared from the lakes was still very much in evidence. But flowers and green leaves were starting to make their way through.
Now, usually I hold the view that the plant life here waits for the National Day (17th May) before exploding forth, but this year spring seems to have come early! There's noticeable amounts of green more or less everywhere you look and the crocuses have come and gone, to be replaced by a variety of colourful flowers everywhere. The one downside I suppose is that it's been rather dry. Maybe there'll be some welcome rain soon.
Speaking of dry, finally got around to Dune! And what an experience that was :). But first I did finish Rejoice. To be honest, the latter half of the book didn't do much to change my initial impression. Which is not that I disliked it exactly... It just left much to be desired as a sci-fi book.
I suppose lately we've read enough books at book club that are of the thought-provoking and sometimes philosophical nature, so this one fits right in with that. I had just hoped that there would be more character. As in character building, interesting protagonists, interplay of individuals and relationships. All that things that made The Book of the Fallen such a treat. I guess this was just a totally different book.
The feeling remains that this was more or less a vehicle for Erikson to just get his opinions on politics, the environment, morality to some extent and a variety of other topics across. I mean, don't get me wrong, the premise of the story itself is kinda interesting. But there's not that much story going on, and whatever there is, is just smothered in the rest of it.
Moving on to Dune, then, was positively mesmerizing! (I have to mention here, that I'm already a third of the way into the second book, Dune Messiah, and that may somewhat colour my opinion of the first book. I will, however, try to recapture the actual feeling of awe and amazement that accompanied my reading Dune itself!)
It's been interesting how the rather diverse books I've been reading lately nonetheless have threads connecting them. There was the pure exploration of space and its impact on the human being that tied in the Weir books to The Remembrance... series. Then the more social and cultural themes that connected Remembrance... to Rejoice. And finally themes of ecological balance, interdependence and in some cases chaos that thread together Rejoice and Dune. Or maybe it's just that in reading one after the next my mind builds these connections.
Frank Herbert, however, takes the reader on a very interesting journey in the way the story unfolds. There's almost a sense of detached wonder as the perspectives shift swiftly from one character to another. I've never read anything quite like this before. You get to feel like you're in each character's head as the story unfolds, and yet Herbert manages to keep secrets, surprises, twists if the plot!
I will, I think, forever wonder if the book would have been a very different experience had I not seen the film before. (This being the new 2021 film.) I suppose the answer must be yes, but I'll never know quite what sort of a different experience it might have been. For anyone reading this who still has a choice, my unequivocal advice would be to read the book first :).
It's not that the film isn't good. It's just that the way the story unfolds in the book is so unique, there's no way any film can really do justice to it. Having seen the visual treatment in the film though, and knowing some of the facts, that colours how you read the book. To be sure, things in the film don't happen quite like they do in the book, so there's plenty of room for discovery.
The same thing is true of the way very early in the book (and this happens in Dune Messiah as well), the reader is pretty much given a blueprint of how the story is going to unfold. Luckily, that does not stop things from being interesting still! After all, there's things none of the characters know :).
I feel as though Dune is a book I will happily re-read. There seem to be aspects of the world, the characters, the story itself that I haven't yet fully grasped. There is more to explore, savour. Can't say I can say the same about Dune Messiah. But I think I'll actually finish it before I say more about that :).
We're now moving into the part of the year where traditionally travel dominates the agenda. After a couple of years of everything being turned on its head, some level of normalcy seems to be creeping back. A few long overdue visits are planned. We shall see how it all goes down.
And all the while we continue to pray for Ukraine.
