(For more information about these videos, see HERE)
Friday, March 31, 2023
Thursday, March 30, 2023
And yet another useful website for TESOL teachers is Gimkit (https://www.gimkit.com/). This website is useful for creating games to review vocabulary sets.
While, about a year ago, I started hearing some of my colleagues talk about a new website called "Gimkit". Which they described as "exactly like Blooket, but much, much better."
I previously described Blooket as "just like Kahoot, but with more bells and whistles". Well, Gimkit can safely be described as "just like Blooket, but with more bells and whistles." (I guess this is how the world of computer apps works, huh? Everyone is constantly trying to create an app that's better than the previous app.)
Gimkit is indeed very impressive, and some of its games are arguably better than Blooket. (The Gimkit games are definitely more complex and involved than the Blooket games.)
The problem, though, is Gimkit really wants your money.
On Blooket, all the important features are completely free.
Gimkit only has a couple free games, and all the good stuff is behind the paywall.
And I suppose I speak for most impoverished TESOL teachers when I say that I'm not going to pay for classroom games out of my own pocket.
Nevertheless, there are a couple games on Gimkit that you can play for free, and I've been getting good use out of these free games.
The games that are freely available appear to change over time. (Last year, "Capture the Flag" and "Snowbrawl" were free, and I got a lot of good use out of both of those games. Now, those games are for paid subscribers only, so I've had to switch to other free games.)
A few of my colleagues have been able to get access to the premium games by signing up for free trials, but I could never get my free trial to work for some reason. (This appears to be just some sort of glitch on my account. Or who knows, maybe I was doing something wrong)
I even had one colleague who claimed to just keep signing up for free trial after free trial, and claimed to be able to exploit the system that way for unlimited access to the premium games.
But all of this was last year. I'm not even sure the free trials are still a thing at Gimkit anymore.
The functionality of Gimkit is pretty much exactly the same as Blooket. Gimkit is better, but the general idea is exactly the same. So I'm not going to repeat everything I said for Blooket. Just see my previous post on Blooket. (And, just like on Blooket, Gimkit allows you to import quizzes from Quizlet, so that's great for me.)
To sum up: even though all the best stuff is behind the paywall, there's still a few good games on Gimkit that you can do for free, so I do still use it occasionally in my classroom. I alternate it with Blooket. When my students are beginning to get sick of the Blooket games near the end of term, I usually switch things up by doing some Gimkit.
Using Beauty and the Beast to Teach Giving Advice in the Present and Past
(TESOL Worksheets--Giving Advice in the Present and Past)
[Directions: In my classes, my students were all very familiar with this movie already, so I was able to use that familiarity to set-up things very quickly. I put on video 1, paused it a couple of times near the beginning to elicit the plot points from the students (i.e. the Beast has forbidden Belle to go into the West Wing. Belle is going into the West Wing, so the Beast is going to be mad, etc.) Then played the rest of video 1.
Before playing video 2, I gave the students the gist question orally: "Why is Belle upset? Why is the Beast upset?"
Then after the gist, the students answer the detail questions. Then a quick vocabulary matching activity. Then students write in the missing words from the script, and listen to check their answers. Then a sorting activity for past advice and present advice. And then some Concept Checking Questions.]
https://youtu.be/qAcwfMS3IHY
https://youtu.be/tt2rBRu3lkg
1. What does Belle want the Beast to do?
2. Why did Belle run away?
3. Where does the Beast say Belle shouldn’t have been in?
4. What does Belle say that the Beast should learn to control?
1. What does Belle want the Beast to do?
2. Why did Belle run away?
3. Where does the Beast say Belle shouldn’t have been in?
4. What does Belle say that the Beast should learn to control?
https://quizlet.com/_d0h4t5?x=1jqt&i=fo89z
https://youtu.be/tt2rBRu3lkg
BELLE: Here now. Don’t do that. Just hold still.
THE BEAST: ROOOOAARRRR! That hurts!
BELLE: If you’d (1)____________ still, it wouldn't (2)____________ as much.
THE BEAST: If you hadn't have (3)____________ , this wouldn’t have (4)____________ .
BELLE: If you hadn't (5)____________ me, I wouldn't have (6)____________ .
THE BEAST: Well you (7)____________ in the west wing.
BELLE: Well you (8)____________ to control your temper. Now hold still. This might sting a little. By the way, thank you for saving my life.
THE BEAST: You’re welcome.
BELLE: Here now. Don’t do that. Just hold still.
THE BEAST: ROOOOAARRRR! That hurts!
BELLE: If you’d hold still, it wouldn't hurt as much.
THE BEAST: If you hadn't have run away, this wouldn’t have happened.
BELLE: If you hadn't frightened me, I wouldn't have run away.
THE BEAST: Well you shouldn't have been in the west wing.
BELLE: Well you should learn to control your temper. Now hold still. This might sting a little. By the way, thank you for saving my life.
THE BEAST: You’re welcome.
Another useful website for TESOL teachers is Blooket (https://www.blooket.com/). This website is useful for creating games to review vocabulary sets.
Blooket is like Kahoot and other websites in the sense that this is another game in which the teacher logs into the website, launches the game from their computer, gives the class a game code, and then the class goes to the join game address (https://play.blooket.com/play) and joins the game from the smart phone or other device. In other words, this is yet another website which requires all the students to have their own devices. (Which, of course, is nowadays not an issue in many contexts.)
I first discovered Blooket while teaching online during the Covid lockdown period. I was covering a class for another teacher (online) and I asked the class what games they liked to do, and they answered "Blooket". I had never heard of that game before, but the teaching assistant for that class guided me on how to go to the website and conduct that game.
I've since then introduced a number of my colleagues to Blooket, and it's taken over our school by storm. All the teachers and students love it.
I've been describing Blooket to my colleagues as "a much more gamified version of Kahoot" or "like Kahoot, but with a lot more bells and whistles".
The bad news is that you need to create an account and log into Blooket before you can see or do anything. I don't think you can even see the games that other teachers have created without creating an account first. (It is possible to share links to Blooket games that you've created, but that other teacher will have to create an account before they can access it.)
The good news is that it's very easy to create an account with Blooket. In fact, Blooket just let's you login through your Google Account, so that's what I've been doing for the past year and a half.
And the really good news is that Blooket has made it very easy to import your quizzes from quizlet into Blooket.
If you login into Blooket, they even have step by step instructions on how to import your quizlet quizzes into Blooket.
So if you're like me, and you already have tons of materials already created for quizlet, then it's super easy to just transfer them over to Blooket. (Once you learn how to do it, then it takes like 2 minutes to transfer a quizlet set over to Blooket.) I'm not sure how the people at quizlet feel about this little feature, but it works great for Blooket.
Then, once you launch the quiz, there's several game modes to choose from (I usually let the students choose), then the game code is created, the students join, and the game starts.
The teacher can decide the length of the game time before starting, but the recommended time for most games is 7 minutes, and I usually go with that. (When you start a game, you have a choice of selecting rather the game ends after a certain amount of time, or after a certain amount of points. When I first started using Blooket, I made the mistake of selecting that the game would end after a certain amount of points. The teaching assistant tried to warn me that this would make the game go on for far too long, and he was right. It's usually best to just select the 7 minute time limit.)
Unlike Kahoot, once the game starts, the teacher can't actually see the questions from their end. The teacher's screen only displays the point totals. But the teacher can't actually see what questions the students are answering. So, unlike Kahoot, I can't really comment on the questions or explain things when students get the questions wrong. I just sit at the front and do nothing. (There are a couple game modes which are an exception to this--classic, and battle royale--which operate more like the Kahoot model.)
For this reason, I never use Blooket to introduce new vocabulary. It's only used to consolidate vocabulary sets we've already studied. (e.g. review all the vocabulary from the previous unit, etc.)
There are days when I feel a bit funny standing up at the front of the class with nothing to do for 7 minutes while students play Blooket. But there are also days when I quite like it--say, on a Monday morning, when Blooket gives me 7 minutes to quietly drink my coffee while the students play the game.
There is an ongoing debate in my staffroom about how useful games like Kahoot, quizlet, Blooket, etc are for language learning.
I myself have made a lot of use of quizlet over the years in my own language study--both to learn Vietnamese and to study TESOL terminology. I've found that quizlet is very useful for helping me to memorize certain terminology--for example, words that have a simple definition, or a one-to-one correspondence with the L1. For example, "dog" is "cho" in Vietnamese, "cat" is "meo" in Vietnamese, etc. Those kind of simple definitions are very useful on quizlet.
Longer definitions or more abstract words don't work as well, however, because after a certain point my brain doesn't really pay attention to the meaning of the definition, it just looks for other clues. For example: "This is the definition that's really long, so it's this word" or "this is the definition that's really short, so it's this word" or "this is the definition that's got a blank in the middle, so it's this word", etc.
I think all of this applies to Blooket as well. (My Blooket sets are, after all, simply imported from my quizlet sets.) Blooket/Quizlet can be potentially very useful for memorizing words with simple definitions, but less useful for longer definitions.
But I do have to confess, these days I just primarily use Blooket to help me manage late students.
Blooket is a 7 minute game that students can join in on at any point during the game. So if a student walks into class late, they can just see the game code and join the game without disrupting the class.
(There are a couple game modes which do not allow late joiners--Blookrush, Battle Royale--but most of the game modes allow students to join at any time.)
The game code is displayed on the computer screen throughout the entire game, so if you're using a projector for your computer screen, students can already see it. But just to make it super obvious, I always write the game code in really big numbers on the white board. So as students come in late, I just point them to the game code on the white board.
In my context, in the 8:00 am class I usually have very few students on time, so I just run the Blooket for the first 7 minutes to allow students to trickle in late without disturbing the class.
Monday, March 27, 2023
Started: The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff and the Battle Over Deep Structure by Randy Allen Harris: Second Edition This is a reread of sorts. I read the first edition of this book and reviewed it on my blog on June 14, 2021. This is my first time reading the second edition.
(This book was on my shelves from December 11, 2022)
Sunday, March 26, 2023
Weekly Reading Vlog #99: Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en p.832-860, Diagramming Sentences 108-120
Book Haul: The Adventures of Robin Hood by Roger Lancelyn Green
Books (40 pages this week)
Journey to the West Volume 2 by Wu Cheng'en p.832-860 (28 pages) (from Journey to the West)
Podcasts and Audiobooks:
Revolutions Season 4: The Haitian Revolution 3rd Listening From: 4.02- The Web of Tension To: 4.08- The Tricolor Commission (from Revolutions Podcast)
Videos from this Week:
Dune by Frank Herbert: Book Review https://youtu.be/fwYMmcXWxws
Bulfinch's Mythology: The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes by Thomas Bulfinch: Book Review https://youtu.be/GNhGwoDHOiQ
Diagramming Sentences by Amy Lynn Hess: Book Review https://youtu.be/AfZzs7mRlsg
This Week in Booktube (not mentioned in the video, but these are the booktube videos I've watched this week): docs, pub
Bookish: Confessions of a BookTuber https://youtu.be/ZlDiR0MIcAk
Jennie Louwes: "Night" by Elie Wiesel is a MUST-READ! REMEMBER HISTORY, so it's not repeated. https://youtu.be/7l7M35glNxI
For more information about what this is and why I'm doing it, see HERE.
Diagramming Sentences by Amy Lynn Hess: Book Review
Started: February 28, 2023
Finished: March 26, 2023
(This is my first time reading this book, so according to my new rules, I'm doing this as a video only review.)
March 5, 2023 Diagramming Sentences p.1-82
March 12, 2023 Diagramming Sentences p.82-104
March 19, 2023 Diagramming Sentences p.104-108
Zombie Nouns and the Passive Voice in Writing - with Steven Pinker https://youtu.be/sS-Txm3R3v8
Playlist HERE
Thursday, March 23, 2023
Bulfinch's Mythology: The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes by Thomas Bulfinch: Book Review
(Book Review--Classics, Rereads, Greek and Roman Mythology)
Started: January 14, 2023
Finished: January 19, 2023
(As I noted in the started post, this is a reread of sorts. I had an audiobook version of this which contained "unabridged selections" and which I listened to multiple times during my time in Japan between 2004 and 2009. But this is the first time I've read a physical copy, and the first time reading the complete version. However, because this is the first time I'm reviewing this book on my blog, it gets the video only review treatment according to my new rules.)January 15, 2023 Bulfinch's Mythology p.1-44
January 22, 2023 Bulfinch's Mythology p.44-379
Bulfinch's Mythology: The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes by Thomas Bulfinch: Book Review
Yet Another Update to My Review Project
The Short Version: From this point forward, I'll be doing only video reviews (and not written reviews) for most of the stuff I review.
The Long Version:
Well, I really didn’t want to have to do this. But in the past few months, it’s become apparent to me that I just don’t have time to write long reviews of everything that I read and watch in the same way that I used to.
Longtime readers of this blog will perhaps remember that this isn’t the first time I’ve tried to streamline my process. In 2013, I tried to implement a word limit on my movie reviews. And in 2021, I did the same with my book reviews.
But longtime readers of this blog may also have noticed that I haven’t been sticking to my own rules. If you check out the past - couple movie reviews I’ve written, you’ll notice that I gave into the temptation to go back to long form. And I’ve also stopped adhering to word count limits in my - recent - book - reviews.
I know. I lack all self-discipline. And yet, I don’t entirely blame myself for disregarding those word limits. After all, this reviewing is supposed to be fun. And what fun is it if you’re going to limit your word count? And this reviewing project is also supposed to be about self-expression, and word limits also hinder self-expression.
Plus, as any student knows, sometimes worrying about strict word count restrictions makes it harder to write, rather than easier. You often spend more time trying to trim yourself down to the word count than you would if you had just written twice as much.
So while I don’t blame myself for slipping back into my lengthy reviews, I’m also finding that I don’t have time to write lengthy reviews of everything I read and watch either.
With two young kids, I have no freetime at home now. If I’m home, I’m watching the kids. (They don’t give me any breaks.)
So that just leaves work.
For years, I got a lot of my blogging done at work. But I now have a lot more responsibilities at work, and I don’t have time at work either.
I suppose I always knew this day would come eventually. Because of various lifestyle choices I’ve made (delaying marriage and kids, teaching in ESL), I’ve managed to avoid adult responsibilities and have an extended adolescence that lasted through my 20s and 30s. This resulted in extra free time that I could devote to my blog. But in the back of my mind, I always knew the day would come when I would have to become an adult, and I would have to cut back on my blogging. And that day has come.
I suppose I should also explain that it takes me ages to write anything these days. I would be embarrassed to tell you how long it takes me to write my average book review. I spend hours and hours writing those things. So when you’re looking at one of my longer book reviews, understand that’s not something I dashed out in a caffeine frenzy one afternoon. That’s something that took me weeks to write.
(I think that actually over the years I’ve been writing on this blog, I’ve gotten less efficient in my writing rather than more efficient. In the early days, I used to go to an Internet Cafe, grab some free coffee, and just write for 40 minutes, and then hit publish. But I can’t seem to do that anymore. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I think once I started re-reading my old blog posts, I realized what absolute drivel I was spewing out. And this caused me to get much more self-critical about my writing over the years, which has consequently made it harder to write. Nowadays, virtually every sentence you see on this blog has been re-written at least once. Whether or not all of this increased care has resulted in an increase in the quality of my writing compared to the early days of this blog… well, I honestly can’t say. I’ll have to leave that for you, dear reader, to judge.)
Now, I suppose the sane response to all of this would be to just stop my reviewing. But I just can’t bring myself to do that. At this point, reviewing stuff on this blog is too much a part of my identity.
It’s pathetic, I know, but as an introvert, I’ve always tended to define myself by my interests. (I suspect other introverts should be able to relate.) Star Trek, Star Wars, D.C. Comics, H.G. Wells, Noam Chomsky, Roman history, Greek mythology, the Paris Commune, George Orwell, Disney… this is the stuff that makes me who I am. (For better or for worse… Freddie deBoer recently wrote of the dangers of people who “are particularly at risk of obscuring the boundaries of the self, confusing what they like with what they are” . Perhaps this is something I should reflect on more seriously… but that’s another subject for another day.)
When I was younger, I imagined I might have some sort of career relating to my interests. When I was a kid, I used to have this dream of being - an - author. It’s a completely unrealistic dream to have, of course, but to be fair to myself it’s a completely normal unrealistic dream for a kids to have--in the same way kids dream of being movie stars, professional sports players, or president.
Longtime readers of this blog will perhaps also remember that for years I was contemplating pursuing an academic - career - in - history. This career path is also wildly unrealistic, although again, to be fair to myself, I think 25 years the problems with pursuing an academic career in the humanities weren’t as widely recognized as they are today.
At this point, I’ve come to accept that I won’t engage with any of these topics professionally. But I still want to engage with them as a hobby. It represents, at least in some form, an attempt to hang onto the ambitions and interests of my youth.
So I’m going to try to keep the reviews going on this blog, but in a much reduced form. Namely, I’m going to be switching to mostly video reviews.
The past few years, I’ve worked out a system where the first time I reviewed a book on this blog, I give it a written review on this blog. When I reread that same book, I do it only as a video review (example here).
It occurred to me that I could save myself a lot of time if I just flipped my system. The first time I reviewed a book on this blog, I would do it as a video review. Then, if I happened to reread it later, I would do a written review.
Video reviews, at least the way that I do them, do not take me nearly as long as my written reviews. I don’t script my video reviews, or edit them. I just turn on the camera, ramble for a while, and then stop. And the review is done.
It’s true I can be quite long winded--I can easily ramble for 30 to 60 minutes. But 60 minutes is the limit. (Both because of technical limitations--the limited storage space on my phone--and because of physical limitations--I’ve exhausted myself after an hour.) So, compared to the 10 hours or so it takes me to write a written review, the video reviews are much more time efficient.
Of course, my video reviews aren’t very good. That’s the trade-off here.
When I first started doing video reviews back in 2016, it was with an eye towards possibly transitioning from written reviews to video reviews. As I wrote about at that time. But when I realized how awful my video reviews were, I decided to keep them just as a supplement to the written reviews. Because video reviews are, let’s face it, not exactly my forte.
I’ve suffered from social awkwardness all of my life, and that same awkwardness manifests itself when I speak on the camera. I’ve never been particularly orally fluent. I mispronounce things. I stumble over my words. I’m prone to spoonerisms. I also have a tendency to just say the wrong word completely, and I don’t even realize it until someone points it out to me. (This happens to me in personal conversation all the time, but it also unfortunately happens in my video reviews a lot. Often I won’t realize I’ve said the wrong word at a key point until I’ve finished recording and am watching the video.)
I often lose my train of thought half-way through a sentence. I’ll get halfway through explaining something, and then realize that I left out a key point and I’ll have to go back and start over. Or often I’ll get done filming a video, turn the camera off, and then realize I had forgotten to say half the stuff I had planned on saying.
Etc. A lot of this, of course, could be ameliorated by doing some scripting or editing of my videos. But then that would defeat the point of switching to videos as a way to save time. So I’ll just be continuing with my usual rambling.
I occasionally get depressed when I compare my ambitions for video reviewing with the actual result. I want to be articulate. I want to discuss great art and literature in an intelligent way, and be part of the cultural conversation. But instead I find myself just forming incoherent sentences and talking in circles.
If I was younger, I think I might have given up on the video reviews altogether. That’s because when I was younger, I had this idea that if you weren’t good at something, you should give up on it and find the thing that you’re good at instead. But now that I’m middle-aged, I’ve come to accept that I’m a man of very limited talents, and I’m never going to find the thing that I’m good at. But you can’t give up on everything, so you might as well keep trying with something. There’s nothing to do but to keep pressing on. If I can’t produce great videos, then I’ll produce mediocre videos. The key point in life is to keep trying something, to keep trying to participate somehow, even if you’re never going to be one of the best.
I do find that some days the words seem to come easier than other days. I’ve never been able to figure out why. Some days I turn on the camera, and I find I can say exactly what I want to say. Some days I turn on the camera, and it’s an absolute trainwreck.
That was true even in the old days--in the old days when I was regularly getting plenty of sleep, in the days before kids.
Nowadays, I find I often am filming videos when I’m tired and sleep deprived. Or when I’m hungry. And I definitely notice that it’s a lot harder to form coherent thoughts on camera when I’m tired and hungry, but unfortunately those times are often the only time I have to film videos. So it is what it is. I’ll continue to make videos in which I’m sleep deprived and struggling to form sentences, and they won’t be great, but at least it’ll be something--some sort of ability to interact with the things I’m interested in.
So, here is the system I’ll try to be following from here on out:
* The first time I review anything, it will be a video review only. I’ll keep this consistent across all my review projects (books, comic books, movies, rewatching movies, podcasts, tv shows).
* The second time I review something on this blog, I’ll do a written review.
This system will drastically cut down on the amount of written reviews I write each year. But at the same time, it will still allow me to still do some written reviews.
Historically I haven’t done much rereading, but this is something I’ve been trying to get into more lately. (You can blame the influence of booktube for this. Since I’ve been on booktube, I’ve become more aware of the value of rereading books. I’ve learned that you can’t just read a book once and claim to be done with it. You have to read and reread it to really absorb it.)
Now, as with everything, we’ll have to see how this goes. (Every year, I always think I’m going to read way more than I actually do). But that’s the plan, at least. Reread a lot more in the future, and do written reviews for all the books I reread, but not for the books I’m reading for the first time.
I’m hopeful this system will have some benefits. For example, there are a number of books I’ve reviewed on this blog where my review was essentially saying “I don’t know what to make of this book. I’m going to have to think about it more before I have an opinion” (e.g. Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, Siddhartha, and, most recently, my review of Dune.) Limiting my written reviews to books I’m rereading will hopefully help to increase the quality of my commentary.
Also, it should eliminate the temptation to write way too much about books that I’m never going to revisit. For example my review of Frozen, an utterly forgettable book that means absolutely nothing to me, but a book on which I still wrote 4,500 words because once I felt like the book review would be incomplete unless I detailed every aspect of the book that was wrong. Under this new system, It is extremely unlikely that I'd ever reread a book like Frozen, and so very unlikely that I'd ever need to put my thoughts in written form. (Although no promises. I do reserve the right to reread junk every now and again if the mood strikes me.)
Some more rules:
* I'm going to do my best to avoid the temptation to add in extras to those video reviews. I'm going to try not to write about my history with the book (although I may talk about that in the videos) or put in links to previous reviews.
With some exceptions: if the book is a reread, I'll allow myself a brief mention of when I previously read it. I'll also include links to the Weekly Reading Vlogs.
If I include links in the video description (for example, if I reference a link explicitly in the youtube video, and then link it in the youtube description), I'll duplicate those on the blog.
I think I'll also allow myself to keep the commonplace book going if I happen upon any short passages I want to share while I'm reading the book. And then I'll link to the commonplace sections from the main review.
But no ratings for video only reviews. I'll only do the ratings for written reviews. (When I only do a video review, I don't think I'm thinking deeply enough to assign a rating. I mean, the ratings are all silly anyway, but still.)
* I've largely moved away from doing audiobooks these days, but on the off-chance I ever get back into them, I think I should make a rule that books I do on audiobook only are not eligible for written reviews. I'm often not processing them deeply enough to justify doing written reviews. (A number of my worst reviews are books I did as audiobooks only: Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, The Hunchback of Notre Dame , etc). So, let's say that I can still listen to audibooks, if the mood strikes me, but they'll be video only reviews. To justify a written review, I have to do both a first and second reading where I'm actually physically reading the book.
This rule will hold only for audiobooks where I actually have the option of physically reading the book. For podcasts, which only exist solely as audio material, I'll still follow the normal procedure (i.e. first listening video review, second listening written review).
* In order to be eligible for a written review, at least 2 years have to have passed from the first video review. If, on the off chance, I reread a book within 2 years of the first reading, that reread review will be another video review. Although it's unlikely I'd reread a book within 2 years. This is far more likely to be an issue with movies. If, for example, I see a movie in theaters, and then 6 months later see it again on TV, that will still be another video review. I won't do the written review until after 2 years from the first viewing.
* There is a lifetime limit of one written review. So if I read a book once, it's a video review. If I reread it after 2 years, it's a written review. But if I then come back to it for a third time, it's a video review. And any subsequent readings will be also video reviews.
If I reread any of the books I've already reviewed on this blog before this point, those will also be video reviews only. I won't make myself write another written review for any of them. Even though a lot of those reviews are pretty awful, we'll just have to let them stand. (But this includes only books I've reviewed on this blog since I've started my book review project on January 21, 2006. Books I'd written about on this blog before then (e.g. here, here or here), I'll count as first time reviews if I ever get around to rereading them. Ditto for book reports I have on my other blog (e.g. here, here or here).
* I'm really going to do my best to review books as soon as I finish them. I really want to stop my habit of allowing weeks or months to go by between finishing a book and reviewing. I just want to finish it, review it, and move on to the next book. (I know I said this last time I tried to reform my book review project, and didn't end up sticking to it, but I'm going to try my best this time.) This will mean pushing forward on the video review even in cases when conditions are not ideal--when I'm tired, or not feeling talkative, or ill, or when the apartment is noisy, etc.
This could mean that there will be a drop in the quality of my reviews, but, as I mentioned above, my reviews were never really all that great anyway, so it won't be that big of a deal.
Also, if I do have a bad day when I film the review, and don't end up talking much sense, hopefully the Weekly Reading Vlogs will make up for this. (As I said in my first Weekly Reading Vlog, one of the reasons for starting that project in the first place was to give myself more chances to talk about a book in case I had a bad day when I filmed the review.)
Addendums
* I was just rereading some of my old written reviews, and a lot of them are pretty terrible as well. So I shouldn't give the impression that my written reviews are always better than my video reviews. Some of my written reviews can also be terrible.
Well, that's all the more reason not to kill myself trying to find the time to write long written reviews! Yet another reason why it makes sense to switch to primarily video reviewing.
I do think that some of my written reviews are good. Some of them I'm actually quite proud of. Every now and again my prose can be quite readable, I think.
I'm not sure what accounts for the inconsistency. I mean, with bad video reviews, I can always just say I was having a bad day. But the written reviews are composed over a period of several days, so I can't just chalk it up to one bad day. Who knows? I guess sometimes the muse strikes, and sometimes it doesn't, and it's very difficult to find a rhyme or reason.
Dune by Frank Herbert: Book Review
Started: January 8, 2023
Finished: January 14, 2023
(This review is written using my new format for book reviews.)
Background Information
According to Wikipedia, this book was originally serialized in 1963-1964, and then published in 1965.
Famously, the author Frank Herbert had a really difficult time getting this book published. The only publisher that would take it was Chilton Books, which mainly published automobile manuals. And the first printing of this book did not do well.
However, this book slowly amassed a following due to word of mouth, and eventually became quite popular.
It has been called by many people the greatest science fiction novel of the 20th century, and it's claimed that this book influenced everything from Star Wars to Star Trek.
The version I read is the 2021 movie tie-in edition. (The one pictured at the top left corner of this blog post, with the words "Now a Major Motion Picture"). I haven't actually seen the 2021 movie, but the movie tie-in edition just happened to be the only version being sold at my local bookstore here in Vietnam, so that's what I bought. This version is 884 pages long, but it also has really big print and large margins at the side of the pages. (It's formatted like the kind of mass-market paperback that you would commonly find in supermarkets and airports.) According to Wikipedia, the original version of this book was 412 pages, so I'm assuming that in that version there was smaller print and smaller margins.
My version also includes, four appendices, a map, cartographic notes and a glossary of terminology at the back--yes, it's one of those kind of books--and an afterwards by Brian Herbert, the son of the author Frank Herbert.
My History With this Book / Why I Read This Book
For the longest time, I didn’t know this book existed. Then, once I found out it existed, I started to hear about it everywhere. (Perhaps a classic example of what is called the Frequency Illusion. Or, perhaps this is because the rise of the Internet has made geek culture more accessible nowadays than ever before. What do you guys think?)
The first time I ever heard of Dune was when the David Lynch movie was being shown on the Disney Channel in the late 1980s. I didn't actually see the movie--I just saw pictures for it in the Disney Channel magazine. But that was my first awareness that this thing called Dune existed. (*1)
If memory serves, the first time I ever realized that the movie Dune was connected to a book was the 2010 review of the movie that Lindsay Ellis did. The impression I got from Lindsay Ellis’s review was that both the movie and the book that it was based on were not all that great. So for a few years after that, I was aware that Dune was based on a book, but I was under the impression that the book wasn’t that great. (*2)
But recently, the past 5 years or so, it seems like I’ve been hearing about Dune everywhere on the Internet. Everyone has been talking about how great Dune is.
Whisky Prajer's mentioned the book a couple times within the past 5 years --HERE and HERE. (If you read those posts, you'll notice that they are somewhat tempered in their praise. But it was enough to get me interested nonetheless.)
And then, there's all the chatter this book has been getting on Booktube. I've seen a number of booktubers talk about this book in the past couple years, but, as readers of this blog know, I'm particularly influenced by Steve Donoghue, from whom I've been taking a lot of my reading cues lately.
Steve has a lot of praise for Dune. He frequently calls it the greatest science fiction of the 20th Century--example here. And then, a few months ago, he talked about it on CPL Radio's Book of the Day.
...and after watching that video, I was completely sold.
I wrote in the comments: "Okay, you guys have talked me into it. I'm going to track down this book now."
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| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9vXB0mNeSE&lc=UgznX151tPPPMkGDORR4AaABAg |
Regular readers of this blog know that I'm frequently complaining about how I can't track down specific books in Vietnam. But in the case of Dune, I knew it was available. I had often seen it here in bookstores before.
A few weeks later, I was in the bookstore in SC Vivo City, saw this book on the shelves, and snatched it up.
The Reading Journey
I spent 3 weeks trapped up in the countryside with my wife’s parents for Tet holiday, and this was one of the books I brought with me. It was raining for several days, and with no TV, limited Internet, and nothing else to do, so I relied on this book as my sole source of entertainment for the week I was reading it. I finished the whole book off, all 884 pages, in one week. Which is pretty good for me.
In fact, the week I read this book, the week of January 15, is my highest number of pages read in one week since I started keeping track. Now, granted, this was on a book with large print and large page margins. But still, a pretty good week of reading, if I don't say so myself.
The Reading Experience
The first thing I noticed about this book was how clunky the writing style was. And the dialogue! The dialogue was so cheesy and unrealistic.
In those first few chapters, the dialogue really interfered with my ability to immerse myself in the story. I kept thinking to myself, “But people don’t actually talk like that!” instead of immersing myself in the plot.
Now, clunky prose has always been a feature of pulp science fiction novels. So if this had been just another cheesy pulp adventure novel, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye at some bad writing. But cheesy pulp novel is not what I had been sold. This was supposed to be the greatest science fiction novel of the 20th century. What was up with this terrible writing? (*3)
I do have to say, though, that the more I read, the less the prose bothered me. By the time I was a couple hundred pages in, I had altogether stopped noticing the bad dialogue and the stilted prose. Maybe this is one of those books where the writing style just grows on you as you read it? Or maybe Frank Herbert’s prose actually got better as the book went on? I don’t know. (*4)
At any rate, I suppose it couldn’t have been that bad, because after all I did finish off all 883 pages in just one week.
This is also one of those books where you are constantly going to the glossary at the back to look up all the new words. This Youtuber here nails it when he says: “I'm spending more time in the glossary in this book than the actual book itself.”
As I read the book, I was constantly debating with myself whether or not to go to the glossary. Does Frank Herbert intend for me to go to the back and look this word up? Or is he trying to get me to guess the meaning from context? Is this word even in the glossary? Or is this just a normal English word that I should know?
[There are some fantasy books where the glossary at the back is meant to be used only as a crutch, and new terms are explained in the story as they come up--The Wayfarer Redemption is a good example of this. But in the case of Dune, I got the impression that Frank Herbert does intend for his readers to be constantly referring to the back of the book as new words come up.]
The constant flipping back to the glossary, and the constant thinking about whether or not I should flip back to the glossary, gave me a bit of a headache as I was reading this book. And, needless to say, took me out of the story.
And yet, the terminology, annoying as it is, does contribute to the world building. It does contribute to the illusion that this is its own complete world which does exist on its own terms. (Every reader knows what I’m talking about here--the feeling of immersion in a fantasy world that is created through a unique terminology. So I won’t belabor this point.)
The plot of this book is… Well, what can I say? The plot is truly epic. This book may be 884 pages long, but man you are really getting your money’s worth for those 884 pages. So much happens over the course of this book.
(This is one of those books that, when you finally finish, you look back and marvel at just how much the characters have changed since the book began. So much has happened that it’s strange to think where these characters started out compared to where they ended up.)
There’s a number of surprise plot twists in this novel, and, if at all possible, it’s best to go into this book without any advanced knowledge of the story. Avoid spoilers, in other words.
Although the good news is this is a book that’s very hard to spoil. It’s not the type of book that you could spoil by simply yelling out something like “Snape Kills Dumbledore.” So much happens in this book that there’s no way someone could spoil all of it unless they were sitting next to you for 30 minutes straight. Think of all the plot machinations in Game of Thrones. It’s kind of like that.
Actually it’s like Game of Thrones in more ways than one. Just like in Game of Thrones, there are multiple noble families that are scheming against each other. Just like in Game of Thrones, there are also multiple subordinates within each great family, all of whom have their own agendas and character arcs. So you have both the drama of the great houses maneuvering against each other, but you also have the drama of the conflicts between individuals within these great houses. It is, in many ways, kind of like Game of Thrones set in outer-space.(*5)
The characters in this book are very conniving, and there’s a lot of scheming and plotting going on. There are plenty of chapters where two characters will just talk for pages on end laying out all their schemes. These conversational scenes are often written in that cheesy dialogue style that I complained about above, but they’re still good fun. If you like books that have complicated plots (and I do), then it’s fun to see all the various schemes that are being laid out, and I appreciated the amount of thought that Frank Herbert had put into all the different plans that different characters have.
However, in my opinion not all these schemes have suitable pay-offs. A few times, there’s a plan that characters will spend a whole chapter talking about, and I expected this plan to evolve into a major plot point later in the book, but then we never hear about it again. It seemed to me like there were some plot threads which were elaborately set-up, but then not adequately paid-off.
But I don’t know. It could be that the reason we never hear about that plot point again is because we don’t need to. The characters have already explained everything that they’re going to do. Maybe it would have been redundant to narrate them actually doing it? Like I said, I don’t know. What do you guys think?
The other problem is that the narrative momentum of the book lags in the second half of the book, when the spiritual element of the story takes center stage. Frank Herbert starts to devote a lot of time to describing mystical trances--these are sections that I thought got a bit weird, and they were also very repetitive.
I’m also not entirely sure everything in the story was 100% consistent. Paul's ability to see the future, for example, seemed to turn on and off depending on when it was convenient for the plot. I know there was some attempt in the novel to explain away the instances in which Paul couldn’t accurately see the future, but… I don’t know, what did you guys think? I’m not sure it entirely made sense. I also thought that Jessica's ability to control people with her voice also seemed to come and go depending on plot convenience.
And then, there was the ending.
In some ways the ending was very satisfying. It gives the reader a thrilling climax packed with action scenes that appear on the surface to hit all the beats that the climax to a story like this needs to hit, even if it is a little bit overly dramatic. (In this interview--courtesy of Whisky Prajer--Frank Herbert says that the huge action scene at the end was deliberately written to be high camp.)
But then at the end, we are left with so many unanswered questions. Everything is left ambiguous. Are we supposed to feel good about Paul’s triumph, or worried about it? What is going to be the long term implications for the future of the Messianic cult that surrounds Paul? Is it going to be a religion of peace and love, or is it going to unleash wars of religious conquest?
To be fair, the uncertainty is intentional. Uncertainty of the future is a major theme in Dune. It’s something that the novel had been hammering home all along, so the uncertainty of the ending did kind of fit with the rest of the novel.
In the same interview, Frank Herbert says he deliberately left things unanswered in the ending of the book, because he thought that leaving unresolved questions would cause the story to remain in the reader’s imagination.
Not to mention, all of these unanswered questions at the end leaves plenty of room for writing sequels. And write sequels Frank Herbert did. He published 5 more Dune books in his lifetime, and then his son kept publishing more books after he died.
I haven’t yet read Dune Messiah, but just based on what I’ve picked up on the Internet, I’m given to understand that this book fully takes on the problems of Messianic cults, problems which are only just hinted at in Dune.
The Setting
Last year, when I reviewed The Return of the King, I had a bit of an epiphany, which is probably incredibly obvious, and yet also strikes me as really interesting--my mood changes depending on the setting of the book that I’m reading. When I’m reading about nice, beautiful places, I feel happy. When I’m reading about barren and desolate places, I start to feel depressed. In other words, the power of the imagination has an effect on my mental happiness.
The barren desert planet of Dune would not have been my first choice to spend 884 pages. If I’m going to spend so much time imagining landscapes, I would much have preferred to read a story set in a lush and beautiful tropical forest. (Once again, this Youtuber here, who jokes about how thirsty he feels when reading Dune, does a good job of capturing the feeling of what it’s like to read this book.)
And yet, once again, I can't help but wonder if I'm missing something. After all, this book is really beloved by a lot of people. And as Whisky Prajer points out, film makers love this book. I guess maybe some people might love the whole "Lawrence of Arabia" awe and majesty of the desert. (Watching the trailer for the new movie, I can see that they're definitely trying to sell the beauty of the desert angle.)
But it's never been my cup of tea. As I wrote in my review of King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard:
the real meat of the journey takes place crossing a desert. And then it becomes a desert story—men wishing for water—wishing they had water again—complaining about not having water, et cetera. (I don’t care for desert crossing stories all that much. They tend to be one note songs.)
The scorching of the desert, and importance of water is also a very big theme in Dune. So just as this theme bored me in King Solomon's Mines, it also tested my patience in Dune. But maybe that's just me.
The Chosen One
I believe that in recent years, there’s been a bit of a backlash against science fiction and fantasy stories that make use of trope of “the chosen one”, mostly in response to all the Harry Potter inspired fantasy stories that came out about 10 years ago. (At least that’s my take on the online discourse. What do you guys think?)
If you’re sick of stories that follow The Chosen One narrative trope (W)…, well, bad news. Dune is definitely a Chosen One narrative.
I mean, you have to cut it a bit of slack because it came out all the way back in 1965, before this narrative was done to death in the Harry Potter-inspired Y.A. market.
But still, consider yourself warned. This is another Chosen One trope.
The Themes of this Book
Oh my god, where to even start with the themes of this book? It’s about spiritualism, it’s about religion, it’s about feudalism, it’s about ecology, it’s about free will and predestination, it’s about drugs, it’s about artificial intelligence, it’s about…
…it’s about just about everything, really.
We could sit here and talk forever about all the themes in this book.
It definitely is an ambitious book. You do have to give it that. It wants to tackle everything.
Now, does it actually tackle all of these themes successfully?
…I don’t know, man. What do you guys think?
(Sorry, I know I’m dodging all of the big questions in this review. But then, I’m not a professional book critic, and no one’s paying me for these reviews. I’m just a guy with a blog. And I feel like the casual reader can’t help but come away from this book a little shell-shocked. Like, yeah, there was really a lot in here. Did it all work? Did it make sense? Does it deal with all of its themes successfully? I’d probably need to re-read this book and spend a lot more time thinking to answer those questions.)
I'm also not going to try to give my thoughts on the various themes in this book. I mean, I definitely do have my own thoughts on religion and my own thoughts on ecology--just to mention two of the themes that are prominent in Dune. But we'd be here all day if I started getting into all my own thoughts on this book's themes. Better to just say it has a lot of themes, and then move quickly on. (This book review is long enough already.)
Connections to Other Books I’ve read
* The Dune series is frequently compared to The Lord of the Ring series. One is supposed to be the greatest fantasy series of the 20th Century, the other is supposed to be the greatest science fiction series of the 20th Century.
Although Tolkien actually didn’t appreciate the comparison, because he wasn’t a Dune fan. See this video HERE.
* The protagonists of this book are named Atreides, after the House of Atreides from Greek Mythology--specifically Menelaus and Agamemnon--who featured in both The Iliad and The Odyssey.
I was able to immediately recognize the allusion because of Andrew Lang. You see, a couple years ago I got annoyed when Andrew Lang used the word Atrides to refer to Menelaus without any explanation, and took the trouble of complaining about it in my review of Tales of Troy and Greece by Andrew Lang. Ever since then, though, the nomenclature of “Atrides” has stuck in my mind. (I think “Atrides” and “Atreides” are interchangeable. I’ve googled it just now, and can’t seem to find any difference in how the terms are used. But let me know if I’m missing something.)
* The historical story of Lawrence of Arabia was one of Frank Herbert’s inspirations in writing Dune. Lawrence of Arabia is also the translator of my edition of The Odyssey, which I reviewed last month.
* Robert A. Heinlein has a blurb on the opening pages of my edition, praising this book for being “Powerful, convincing and most ingenious.” For my review of some of Heinlein’s books, see HERE, HERE and HERE.
* This book was one of the inspirations for Star Wars. The desert planet of Tatooine especially was influenced by Dune.
* This book was also one of the inspirations for Star Trek, or so Brian Herbert claims in his afterward. The machine like logic of the Vulcans in Star Trek are based on the Mentats from Dune. (It could be true. This book came out in 1965. The first episode of Star Trek didn't air until 1966).
* There’s also the theory that Dune is a response to Foundation by Isaac Asimov.
Extended Quotation
It was a relief globe of a world, partly in shadows, spinning under the impetus of a fat hand that glittered with rings. The globe sat on a freeform stand at one wall of a windowless room whose other walls presented a patchwork of multicolored scrolls, filmbooks, tapes and reels. Light glowed in the room from golden balls hanging in mobile suspensor fields.
An ellipsoid desk with a top of jade-pink petrified elacca wood stood at the center of the room. Veriform suspensor chairs ringed it, two of them occupied. In one sat a dark-haired youth of about sixteen years, round of face and with sullen eyes. The other held a slender, short man with effeminate face.
Both youth and man stared at the globe and the man half-hidden in shadows spinning it.
A chuckle sounded beside the globe. A basso voice rumbled out of the chuckle: "There it is, Piter - the biggest mantrap in all history. And the Duke's headed into its jaws. Is it not a magnificent thing that I, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, do?"
"Assuredly, Baron," said the man. His voice came out tenor with a sweet, musical quality.
The fat hand descended onto the globe, stopped the spinning. Now, all eyes in the room could focus on the motionless surface and see that it was the kind of globe made for wealthy collectors or planetary governors of the Empire. It had the stamp of Imperial handicraft about it. Latitude and longitude lines were laid in with hair-fine platinum wire. The polar caps were insets of finest cloud-milk diamonds.
The fat hand moved, tracing details on the surface. "I invite you to observe," the basso voice rumbled. "Observe closely, Piter, and you, too, Feyd-Rautha, my darling: from sixty degrees north to seventy degrees south - these exquisite ripples. Their coloring: does it not remind you of sweet caramels? And nowhere do you see blue of lakes or rivers or seas. And these lovely polar caps - so small. Could anyone mistake this place? Arrakis! Truly unique. A superb setting for a unique Victory."
A smile touched Piter's lips. "And to think. Baron: the Padishah Emperor believes he's given the Duke your spice planet. How poignant."
"That's a nonsensical statement," the Baron rumbled. "You say this to confuse young Feyd-Rautha, but it is not necessary to confuse my nephew."
The sullen-faced youth stirred in his chair, smoothed a wrinkle in the black leotards he wore. He sat upright as a discreet tapping sounded at the door in the wall behind him.
Piter unfolded from his chair, crossed to the door, cracked it wide enough to accept a message cylinder. He closed the door, unrolled the cylinder and scanned it. A chuckle sounded from him. Another.
"Well?" the Baron demanded.
"The fool answered us, Baron!"
"Whenever did an Atreides refuse the opportunity for a gesture?" the Baron asked. "Well, what does he say?"
"He's most uncouth, Baron. Addresses you as 'Harkonnen' - no 'Sire et Cher Cousin,' no title, nothing."
"It's a good name," the Baron growled, and his voice betrayed his impatience. "What does dear Leto say?"
"He says: 'Your offer of a meeting is refused. I have ofttimes met your treachery and this all men know.' "
"And?" the Baron asked.
“He says: ‘The art of Kanly still has admirers in the Empire.’ He signs it: ‘Duke Leot of Arrakis.’” Piter began to laugh. “Of Arrakis! Oh, my! This is almost too rich!” (p.21-23)
***END QUOTE**** (This conversation / exposition dump goes on for another 10 pages, but I can’t quote the whole chapter. You get the idea.)
I know it seems like I ripped that out of context, but I didn't. At least not by much. This is only the second chapter, and this is our first introduction to the Harknonnens. (Some of this stuff is alluded to in the previous chapter, but you're not missing much context.)
This is a perfect example of the clunky prose and cheesy dialogue I complained about earlier in the review.
It's also a great example of the all the terminology. As you're reading this, how much should you stop and go to the glossary in the back? How much should you just read on and hope it makes sense later?
(From the passage I just quoted above, filmbooks, suspensor, elacca, Arrakis, spice, and Kanly are all in the glossary. But some other words, which feel like they should be in the glossary, are not, like ellipsoid and Veriform. So if you went back to the glossary for those words, you'd be wasting your time.)
Future Reading Plans
The Rest of the Series?
This is the first book in a whole long series which has 5 sequels written by Frank Herbert, two more sequels written after his death, and currently 14 prequels written by his son. (The most recent of which was just published last year, so I expect more books will keep coming out.)
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise) |
Steve Donoghue seems to be of the opinion that the Frank Herbert books are must reads, but the Brain Herbert sequels are passable.
Whisky Prajer, however, cautions me about even continuing with the rest of Frank Herbert’s books.
Don't do that -- Herbert only gets worse! I think I made it as far as Dune: Messiah. Herbert was now in the habit of grinding out a book a year , and his hunger for the yearly paycheck could not be denied, except by readers like you and me saying "no!" and refusing to read further.
And yet, part of me feels like I should continue with this series, because I’m lead to believe (from what little research I’ve done) that Frank Herbert’s vision for this whole saga is to show how the messiah figure is actually an antihero. And I don’t believe that comes through clearly until the sequels. (As Whisky himself seems to indicate in his post here)
So I feel like I should really continue with the sequels.
And, it looks like they are actually available in Vietnam. So I could continue with them this year.
And yet, part of me doesn’t want to. At least not yet. I’ve got a lot of other plans for my reading list this year, and I’m just not ready to tackle a massive series like this. (These books, after all, are not short.)
Maybe I’ll wait a few years, and then try to come back at this series.
Maybe I’ll even re-read Dune, and then just keep running with the rest of the series. Maybe.
If I am going to do this whole series, I could probably do with a re-read of Dune. (It’s now been over 2 months since I finished this book, and I hate to say it, but I’m already starting to forget a lot of the plot details in the second half of this book. Which characters died at the end again? I don’t even remember. So maybe best to just step away from this series for a few years, and then come back and try to tackle the whole thing at once.)
Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov
As I mentioned above, some people say that Dune may be a reply to Foundation.
Also, in the same comment I quoted above, Whisky advises me to just re-read Foundation instead of Dune.
That time was better spent (for me) reading Asimov's Foundation series. Asimov was also hungry for the paycheck, but at least he could write -- or more likely could spot someone who knew.
I read Foundation back in high school, but don't remember it very well at all. But I do remember the general feeling of being fascinated by it. So I'm overdue for a re-read of it. And I never read any of the other books in the series, so I'd like to read those as well.
Links
For Whisky Prajer's thoughts, see:
* In search of lost books, and
Whisky writes:
Dune was finally, to my eyes, a hippie book. I bought it in a hippie used-book shop on the west coast. The only people discussing it were long-hairs who stank of patchouli and something faintly skunky. Thus: hippie book.
I had this in the back of my mind while I read Dune, and as I was reading Dune I could totally see why the hippies would love this book--Dune is very influenced by Eastern mysticism, and also has descriptions of mystical trances that are brought about by the aid of drugs. Since this book was published in 1965, right as the hippie movement was beginning, no wonder the flower child generation loved it.
Also, I'm sure the themes about ecology must have seemed very prescient in 1965, and as the environmental movement began in the late 1960s and early 70s, that no doubt also helped the popularity of this book.
More links (also courtesy of Whisky):
* Willis E. McNelly interviews Frank Herbert on February 3, 1969 at Herbert's house. (There is a lot in this conversation. But it's all fascinating.)
* Haris Durrani’s Twitter thread: “Do you think #Dune is a white saviour narrative? Well, you’re wrong.” (This thread is also referencing stuff that happens in the sequels, which is another reason I might be sort of tempted to pick the sequels up someday.)
7 out of 10 stars. It's a really ambitious story, but the prose is clunky, and, on first reading at least, I'm not entirely sure the story makes complete sense.
January 15, 2023 p.1-884
(*1) My siblings and I grew up almost exclusively on the Disney Channel because my mother disapproved of regular network TV. This is something I've mentioned before HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, etc.
I’m not quite sure why the Disney Channel was airing Dune. I don’t believe it had any connection to Disney? (Someone correct me if I’m wrong). But back in those days, every once and a while the Disney channel would show some random stuff.
I remember photos for the movie Dune appeared in the monthly Disney Channel magazine. (I used to pour over every inch of that magazine when I was a kid, looking for exciting stuff to watch.) And I remember seeing the photos of the giant worms. And also I remember Patrick Stewart’s face appeared prominently in one of the photos, which got my attention, as I was a huge Star Trek fan during those days, and this must have been right after Star Trek: The Next Generation first premiered.
I never bothered to actually watch the Dune movie--I don’t remember why not. I guess I just wasn’t that interested, and it must not have been on at a convenient time.
(*2) Lindsay Ellis's Dune review is not currently on Youtube. Apparently she later took down this review because of all the hate it received--see HERE. However it can still be viewable on other sites--like this copy at the Internet Archive. It's primarily a review of the 1984 movie, but it does reference the book as well. If you haven't watched the video, Lindsay Ellis thinks that both the book and the movie have an uninteresting plot because they rely on a MacGuffin to move the plot along. She also criticizes the writing style of the book, and says that the book is constantly telling you what all the characters are thinking in a style that is really annoying.
(*3) Whisky Prajer and I are on exactly the same page on this, by the way.
In his 2018 post on Dune, Whisky writes:
Amalgamated linguistics aside, Herbert could hardly be called a “stylist.” He believed in sturdy narrative architecture, and laid down words like so much bricks and mortar.
I wanted to like Frank Herbert, but Geez-Louise his prose is stilted!
(*4) Steve Donoghue is of the opinion that the prose of this book gets better after the first 200 pages. In one of his (many) Dune videos, DuneTube 2019: Dune, Part 2!, Steve says that the problem was that the first 200 pages went through so many drafts that Frank Herbert just became inured to it, and lost the ability to see the problems with his prose. Steve thinks that this is a problem that's limited only to the first 200 pages, and contrasts that to the subsequent 200 pages, which he says were written by "a complete master in absolute control of what he's doing."
I didn't watch this video until after I had already finished Dune, but it does square with my experience as a reader. The first 200 pages struck me as really clunky. After about 200 pages, I stopped noticing the problem. But like I said above, it could also be that I just got used to Frank Herbert's prose. I don't know. I definitely know I've heard other people who criticize Frank Herbert's prose style generally.
Once again, I guess I'll throw the question out to you guys. Let me know in the comments what you think.
(*5) But of course I shouldn't say that Dune is Game of Thrones set in space, because Dune predates Game of Thrones.
Also, admittedly it's not an exact analogy. In Game of Thrones, we see several Noble Houses plotting against each other. In Dune we know other Great Houses are out there, but we really only see 2 of them: House Harkonnen and House Atreides.