The first few pages (maybe 100-150) were a bit of a struggle as we (Katie, Will, and Collin) tried to get familiar with the world of Dune and the vocabulary that Herbert invented for the novel. It’s a bit of a coming-of-age story, but highly political and on a far-off desert planet called Arrakis, with hyper-cognitive abilities and spice… and sandworms… and other cool things like birds that drink blood as a source of water. It’s a very thoroughly thought-out world that just takes a little bit of time to get into. Finding the glossary in the back before reading for six hours would help....
In Dune, a young boy named Paul has been trained by his mother, a Bene Gesserit, to have heightened senses which come in handy for telling if people are lying or nervous, among other things. He is thought to be the Kwisatz Haderach (a male Bene Gesserit who can bridge space and time with his mental powers). Their family arrives on Arrakis as royalty, taking control of spice mines (the most valuable resource in the universe, apparently), and deal with the politics and threats that follow. There is an invented religion and a whole manner of thinking that the natives of the planet hold which is based around water, a highly limited resource to the point that they wear stillsuits which recycle their body’s moisture, losing only a thimble’s worth per day. (Dew Gatherer is a profession on Arrakis. They gather dew.) There are assassination plots, cultural clashes, class issues, mindgames, action scenes, GIANT SANDWORMS, and basically no hope at all ever.
One of the things that we found interesting about our text is how the author was able to include the thoughts of characters within the text. These thoughts helped give the reader another perspective from a certain character's point of view and also sometimes served as foreshadowing in the story. One of the times that these thoughts are used as foreshadowing reference to ancient text that would point to the main character (Paul) being the chosen one! The thoughts were also not limited to a couple characters but showed most characters perspectives and helped the reader get to know that character better.
The most enjoyable aspect of this binge for our group was when the three of us were binge reading together. We found ourselves more easily focused and able to stay on task with the book while also discussing new and exciting plot points as we progressed. When we binged on our own the time seemed to still go by more quickly than it did during the television binge however it did tend to drag on just a bit more. Having your group members around you forced us to keep our minds on task while suppressing the desire to busy our minds with something other than the daunting task of an 800-page novel. Another perk of being in the group setting was being able to talk out confusing parts of the book where the author took his liberty with language and created words of his own. If it weren’t for the group as a whole some of us may not have even found the very handy glossary in the appendix. It was clear that we enjoyed the group binge of this book far and beyond the solo binge.
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