Is Dune Hard To Read?

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Unless you’ve buried your head in the sand, in recent years it’s been hard to not hear about Dune, the recent movie adaptation was an astounding success, and because of this the book has received a huge surge in popularity, but what if you’re not a terribly confident reader?

Or maybe you’re just interested in how easy it is to read through, either way, in this article we’ll be asking if Dune is hard to read, and what makes it that way, so without further ado let’s get started.

Background

Dune is a novel written by Frank Herbert in 1965, as you probably know already, it’s a science fiction novel, one of the first of its type, and rivals a universe similar in status to that of Star Wars, or even the Warhammer 40k universe.

In total there are 6 original books written by Frank Herbert, meaning that there’s a lot of content if you’re someone that’s up to the idea of exploring a whole new universe.

The series expands through several thousands of years in the dune universe, so characters that you’ll meet in the first novel will not be around at the end of the 6 novels. 

Reading Dune

With the series expanding 6 novels, it can be easy to understand why Dune could be considered difficult to read, but in reality dune isn’t difficult to read due to the complexity of the text or challenging language, but instead is difficult to read because of the slog that it can become.

Frank Herbert’s writing style really forces you to begin the story with very little exposition, and understanding of the sci-fi world that you’ve entered, and because of this, Dune can sometimes read like a history textbook, where information is conveyed through characters’ internal monologues and passable prose.

Whilst Dune is considered to be one of the best pieces of sci-fi literature ever written, for many it can be extremely easy to give up whilst reading because tension is frequently diffused by tone, and for some, the world building isn’t something that they enjoy

Exposition In Dune

As briefly stated above, Dune can sometimes be slightly lacking in terms of exposition, which leaves us as readers guessing about the world that we’re watching events unfold in.

Whilst this is by no means a bad thing, often at times it can lead readers to feel confused, as we’re dropped straight into the deep end of the pool by Frank Herbert, and sometimes readers can feel as if they’re playing catch up, in an attempt to understand the world in which everything is taking place. 

It’s important to note though that this really isn’t a bad thing, just something that’s quite unique, especially to sci-fi literature.

Frank gives us as readers the opportunity to imagine the world that he’s creating around us whilst we read, and even though we’re not given many exact descriptions of the worldbuilding taking place around us, it’s just enough that you can let your mind wander and interpret the world of Dune in a lot of different ways. 

Seeing readers of Dune have slightly different opinions on what certain things look like is a unique but really exciting thing to happen, especially for a book written roughly 20 years after the Lord Of The Rings was written, which offers much more exposition and explanation to its readers than Dune does. 

Dictionary

Dune also introduces a wide variety of new vocabulary to the reader, allowing us to get immersed into the dystopian sci-fi universe that Dune takes place in, readers are immediately bombarded with words such as Bene Gesserit, and crysknife, which can be confusing to understand the meaning of until further context is provided in the story.

A handy tool that’s useful for reading through Dune is a novel that has a ‘dictionary’ of the many different terms used in the back of the book.

This is super handy to be able to flick to, and remind yourself of what a word means, or its context in the story. 

Perspective

As well as the different language and lack of exposition, the perspective is something that’s often found to be confusing as well in Dune.

The novel is written in an omniscient third person perspective, which results in us bouncing between multiple different perspectives of characters that we may know nothing about.

We learn about many different characters this way, and can sometimes be confusing to read, instead of the typical first person perspective that books like The Great Gatsby, To Kill A Mockingbird and Moby Dick all have. 

This third person perspective combined with our lack of understanding of the world that Dune takes place in can lead us to be questioning what’s actually happening whilst we read through the novel.

But once you carry on reading, ultimately you’ll understand with knowledge you gain from further through the novel, and that’ll piece together everything that happened previously.

It’s an ingenious way of providing context to a piece of information that you already know, but can prove tricky to wrap your head around at first.

Final Thoughts

Dune is often considered the greatest sci-fi novel of all time, as well as that it’s the highest selling sci-fi novel of all time too, and that’s for good reason.

The world that Frank Herbert set up for readers to explore is one that’s rich in drama, and whilst it’s certainly sci-fi, isn’t too ridiculous for readers to get blown away by.

Reading Dune can be challenging at first, (i certainly found it challenging) but sticking at it can prove to be a wonderful experience, that by no means will you regret.

https://youtu.be/WlwLlGyFpl8