Why You Should Read: Dune by Frank Herbert (Spoiler-Free)

you know i've been fearful of doing this video for the longest times for reasons that i'll get into but you know what i decided that i will not fear let's talk about my favorite book of all time and why you should read it deep in the human unconsciousness is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense but the real universe is always one step behind logic once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free but that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them the power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it the mystery of life isn't a problem to solve but a reality to experience and hope clouds observation there is no escape we pay for the violence of our ancestors the mind commands the body and it obeys the mind orders itself and meets resistance they betray the psychological tone the deep uncertainties and the striving for something better plus the fear that nothing would come of it at all i must not fear fear is the mind killer fear is the little death that brings total obliteration i will face my fear i will permit it to pass over me and through me and when it has gone past i will turn the inner eye to see its path where the fear has gone there will be nothing only i will remain [Music] hey what's up bookworms sandworms and fighting freeman i am mike wildeb and i am here today to talk to you about frank herbert's dune 1965 the best selling science fiction novel of all time and if you ask me the best book of all time so yes cat out of the bad guys favorite book of all time so obviously i'm gonna have a lot of good things to say now i have put this off for the longest time because with my why you should read series i always feel like it's what i consider people pleasers it's something that people are going to love i think if they just give it a chance with dune i've kind of put off doing this one because i uh i i don't think that everyone's going to love this i've even said before that i feel like at this point most people that i recommend this to that try it are probably not going to like it i expect more people to dislike it or be indifferent on it that actually love it like i do so uh that's why i've kind of put this off for the longest time but after i did that reaction video to the new trailer and people saw just how important this book is to me uh the outcry for me to do this video was too much for me to ignore and uh on this channel i always like to give the people what they want so um what i'm gonna do now tell you a little background about this book for me i read it for the first time when i was 15 and i hated it i didn't finish it i was like that's just too much for me i remember my dad and my brother watching david lynch's movie when i was younger i had no winch i was like this isn't star wars i'm out of here right uh but when i got into high school i found it in the high school library and i said hey you know what why don't i give that a try uh didn't finish it i say i probably got to about the in middle of the second act which i'm not going to be spoilers in here don't worry but uh i i tried it again later on in high school and i actually finished it that time i think i was 17 decided i was a junior in high school and i was like you know i kind of like it but i think it was just really super pretentious and and i get people say hey do you see you use the word pretentious when you were 17 well yeah i'm a reader you know it just kind of comes along that way anyhow a little bit of time went by and it was still in my head and i was like well did i did i did i love the book i i can't even decide why is it still in my head and so i tried it again senior year of high school right before graduation and i remember being so thankful that i didn't have finals as a senior that i got to test out of because i became obsessed i absolutely loved everything it just clicked for me in a way that i could not explain my third eye opened you say and all of a sudden this book just completely changed the way that i viewed everything and that's really what we're gonna be talking about here so while usually my why you should reads like i said they're gonna be stuff that hey you give this a try you're gonna like it this is gonna be more of a why i love dune it's just gonna fly into the white you should read banner uh because i think that's more recognizable to people and i think that there are a lot of people that are curious about the book there's a lot of new interest in it after that trailer dropped it's re-entered amazon's best sellers list i'm sure it's going to hit the new york times bestsellers list here pretty soon so i think there's gonna be lots of new opportunity for me to share this amazing story with other people who might not have given it a chance otherwise it kind of feels like that lord of the rings moment for me where i've been talking about lord of the rings for the longest time and friends were like oh i'm not in a fantasy and then that first trailer for fellowship of the ring came out they're like okay i might try this out and then they saw the movie and they loved it and they read the whole series so i kind of feel like that's what this is going to do for doom for me given that movie is as good as i think it's going to be but that is kind of my background here a little background only on the book published in 1965 it's been translated into a dozen languages it sold over 20 million copies and it is regularly cited as the world's best-selling science fiction novel there are people who will debate that with you but i i kind of think it's undeniable it spawned five sequels uh two movie attempts uh now a tv movie in 2000 uh and like i said the new movie is coming out here maybe soon depends on what's going on with the the virus it shall not be named but let's get into it guys by talking about what is it about now it is set in the distant future the year 10 191 to be perfectly clear and we are amidst a feudal interstellar society in which various noble houses control planetary feasts dune tells the story of the young paul tradies whose family accepts the stewardship of the planet arrakis while the planet is an absolute inhospitable and sparsely populated desert wasteland it is the only source of melange or the spice a drug that extends life and enhances mental abilities belange is also necessary for space navigation which requires a kind of multi-dimensional awareness and foresight that only the drug can provide now as melange can only be produced on arrakis control the planet is thus a coveted and very dangerous undertaking the series explores the multi-layered interactions of politics religion ecology technology human emotion as factions of the empire confront each other in a struggle for control of arrakis and the spice and in turn control of the universe shall we say and guys that is about as basic of a what is it about that i could give you without giving you any real spoilers there so let's just move immediately into what makes it good or bad now spoiler alert here uh it's gonna be mostly good coming from me but i do wanna let you know there's gonna be no spoilers for the novel effect i'm not even gonna get into the nitty-gritty of the book because i do intend to review just doom by itself standard book review before the movie comes out so i'm not gonna get into every single little detail of this i'm just going to talk about this world overall and why i think that you would really dig it now it is social science fiction i hate the sub genre thing but it's hard to say that's not because it's less concerned with technology and it's more concerned with these ideas on society yes this is a very very thought provoking book you're not going to find a lot of buck rogers shoot them up here there's no hard science outside of some basic physics it's very very approachable i think with its science it's nothing no technobabble that's going to lose you or anything like that but it's plot mechanics are philosophical biological ecological uh political big-time political and is highly thought-provoking on things like power and religion and traditions and customs and man vs nature fate versus free will overpopulation and of course yes politics i cannot tell you that the in-world politics in this are some of the best in the game and i think that's why you get so many people who are convinced that this is fantasy because they don't think that science fiction can have politics quite as good as this um i don't know if that's necessarily the case but let me address that elephant first this is called the best-selling science fiction novel of all time because it is a science fiction novel what i've always argued is it is a science fiction novel that is a good place to welcome in fantasy fans people who have only read fantasy and they want to try out some science fiction this is the perfect place to start so i think that's why it gets there because if you're gonna break it down like that then i mean is there really science fiction or is science fiction fantasy the same thing that's a conversation for another time but i will go to my deathbed calling this a science fiction novel there had to get that out of the way first now the people who love twists and turns and backstabbing and backroom politics all that stuff you loved about when you were watching game of thrones whatever you're going to feel right at home in this world i'll get into that influence here in a little bit because there's not a page that goes by where you're like well that feels like some serious political posturing but whose side are they on who's doing this hey who's working in the shadows over here you are questioning the whole time and it's not in a way where it's just like it's not a scooby-doo thing where you're like well it's just going to be this person that makes the most sense no there are big-time betrayals and when they happen you're actually shocked by them and then when you get into things like succession and you know just keeping your eye on the throne i guess you'd say uh frank's not afraid to cross any lines uh i won't call this grimdark but i will say that there are things that he does in this book that even the grim darkest writers don't touch and he does it in this book so there are some upsetting things here you're not going to have over overly sexual violent themes or anything in here he's very much like a robert jordan or a tolkien in the way that those violent things happen he's just not going to explain them to you in detail and that's another hang up for a lot of people is that his prose might not be what you're looking for but i'll get to that when i get into uh the bad stuff um the whole essential coming of age story in sci-fi that is what this book is it there there are plenty of coming-of-age stories but this is it this is the coming-of-age story for science fiction because i was the same age as paul the first time i read this and i was much like the younger paul who is very much a brat when this book starts and then i think as he grew and i grew we were the same age at the end of this book when i really just clicked with the book and i think that that really made it where i was able to identify with this guy you know who was just afraid to embrace his uh his responsibility his duty and he has to grow up overnight it's one of those kind of things so it very very relatable to uh to to young readers i think and that's why i say also i don't necessarily know if it's one of those things you have to read while you're younger i don't think so uh because i know a lot the reading level for this is a little higher than us than yourself this isn't y a or anything i wouldn't call it an overly difficult read or anything i just think maybe if you've read something like lord of the rings i think you'll be okay here but you know if you're going straight from like the hobbit to this it might be a little tough for you because it is a a large jump in the uh the reading level there but again that just depends on you obviously that depends on you but um yeah the idea of dealing with what your destiny could bring to the future that's the big one in this book where it's just like would you do what you have to do if you knew what the result was going to be and it wasn't a happy ending it's it's it's got so many struggles like that and again this book isn't pew pew pew shoot them up this book is seriously thought provoking and in ways that you cannot compare to any other story i mean there's been numerous things that have tried to rip this off and we're going to talk about those here in a minute but again it's the struggle of doing right and wrong or what you think is right is it right for everyone else is it self-serving you know those are these are the kind of questions that paul has to face in the story you think about the responsibility that's that's thrust on this young man's shoulders at this age is just immense i mean it's the weight of an entire planet literally and in the universe so uh yeah it's really hard not to get the spoilers talk about stuff like that but uh displacement death love family uh adaptation and new cultures and ideas these are things that i really feel like a lot of science fiction struggles with and frank was not afraid to tackle these ideas he went right forward if you're one of those people who loves to have some kind of social narrative in your book you're going to love it because if you're looking for it it's probably there especially those save the planet types it's going to be there if you're looking for it the ecology of dune is a subject all in its own uh so i mean frank himself was an ecologist so it makes sense why that's all in here and again it'll really make you think and especially overpopulation lack of resources that's a big big thing in here so again all you green people are going to find something to love here for sure now if you've watched any of my stephen king videos you know i am a sucker for the coming of age story and i believe that this is a big reason why because i feel like this not only checks all the boxes i felt like it created some of those boxes you know when i was a young man i look at it now i'm like yeah i still feel that way i felt even more that way now so i feel like it created a lot of those things that other series feel like okay well we got to do let's do this kind of like kind of like what dune did you'll hear that a lot there's a reason that this book is so influential to anybody that's about the age of 30 or over and now seems to be branching to another generation it it's it it deserves the respect that it gets now i want to talk about some bad things here because i will say there's no perfect book guess it's my favorite book of all time but i will always say there's no such thing as a perfect book one day i'll talk about lord of the rings and i'll tell you the problems i have with that you guys know how much i love that story so uh it is slow paced that's a huge one there is not a lot of action if you're not fine like there's a chapter in here that is like 50 pages of a dinner party and it's just everyone at this table posturing politically and there are so many people who tell me oh i lost that chapter because i was so bored like how are you bored in that i just thought that was absolutely mesmerizing but a lot of people they need some shoot em up they need someone getting stabbed hitting someone getting shot they need someone getting betrayed it look you're going to get a lot of that stuff in the story but it's not all front loaded or back loaded like you're expecting it's sporadically placed throughout this book and when it that way when the action happens it matters but yes this is going to be a very slow book to some people so you got to understand what you're getting into here this isn't star wars you're not going to be having a thrill ride of action but when it happens it's good stuff speaking of the political posturing yes there's there's a lot of political posturing and a lot of build towards that and it all counts in the end but also there's a lot of words that are going to be thrown at you right up front but he gesture it quick rock things you're gonna be like what is he talking about right now but like a stormlight archive or like a wheel of time if you're just patient and you wait you're gonna get those answers of what this all the stuff is you love all that prophecy stuff in a song of ice and fire this is where it came from i'll fight you on that this is where it came from ideals and questions raised that you might not get a satisfying answer to in the original now look i say that this is very much a standalone book if you only want to read this book because there's a lot of people lately been like wait this is a series i thought it was one book you can read just this one book and i feel like you will be satisfied you might have a couple things you'd be like huh i wonder if he meant this but you could be like but i come to this conclusion it doesn't leave any this wasn't setting up a a big story this was meant to be a standalone book but the overwhelming success at least i believe this the overwhelming success was like okay well we got to write a sequel right i think you could read this one and be fine but if you want to know more the sequels are always there but again there might be some people who feel like they might not have all their answers or whatnot but uh just know that it's there there are going to be things that are able to be branched out but again if you want to treat this as a standalone i think you're going to be fine that's the only real bad i have for it uh i don't think that there's any problems really that are going to just be uh story breaking for you uh but again it's hard for me not to look at this in a biased nature this has been a book i've adored for 15 or 25 years now so i'm doing my best to uh to nitpick here but let's go on to why you're here and that of course is why you should read it now i believe it is good to know the pillars of your genre just how i tell everybody you love fantasy go back and reload the rings give it the respect it deserves because that is where it came from that's where all of the modern fantasy really really grew its love from even robert jordan loved tolkien even brandon sanderson loved tolkien joe abercrombie love tolkien everyone was a tolkien fan and i feel like every sci-fi writer out there is going to tell you that this was one of their influences and for good reason so i think you owe it to yourself if you're a fan of the science fiction genre or if you're looking to cross into science fiction from fantasy you owe it to yourself to read this and at least see what it's all about and i believe that dune is every bit to science fiction what lord of the rings is to fantasy so that's why i make that comparison there it is every bit as important it is every bit is revered and again you're not going to find a single science fiction author probably working today that didn't tell you that they were influenced in some shape form or fashion by dune or by other things that were influenced by dune and that brings me to my next point here why i should read it uh you like star wars you like a song of ice and fire you like the wheel of time this is going to be your thing because all of those completely took influence from this that's why when i see uh other booktubers who say oh they absolutely love willa time they love a song of ice of fire but uh they just didn't like dune i'm sorry i hate to sound the whole gatekeeper thing but i have to question if you really read it because it's blatantly obvious one of my mods just read uh dune and was like oh my god i see so much will the time and i see so much song of ice and fire in this i'm like it's impossible not to because they're there the iel are the fremen the benny jestery are the eyes to die i mean you could do this all the way down the line you ever heard of azor ahai yeah that comes from huista tatarak it's this stuff is just blatantly obvious to anybody looking for it you like the good old house wars in a game of thrones i cannot tell you enough how influential this is i say this is a humongous star wars fan but there would not be a star wars without doom i mean even frank himself said he was too good to sue george lucas but he should have right uh but anyway and what i always say is look this book is not going to be for everyone if you read it is it going to be your favorite book of all time probably not probably not there's a chance sure sure i think this is the one book i can think of where it really depends on where you're at in your life before it clicks with you or not because again it was until my third try when i was 18 that all of a sudden i was like oh my god everything in this makes so much more sense to me than it did before and it wasn't because of like a reading comprehension level it was because of where i was in my life at the time the next biggest question i get is should i read the sequels because i've heard that they suck here's the thing with that if you go into the sequels expecting more of the first book it's not going to happen it's very different it takes the franchise in a more different direction a more science fiction direction that it already was in my opinion it's really super sci-fi uh you get everything from like clones to shapeshifters to your intergalactic war uh so it yes it's it's it's very different than this first book and i think that's because a lot of the characters from the first book aren't really the focal point of the entire series and i think that that really throws some people off but i want to show you these here these are my paperback copies from when i was in high school when i went to half price not half price books i don't remember what the store bookstore was back then might have been half price but i think it might have actually been hastings anybody remember hastings anyways if you can see up there i upgraded when they put out the new uh paper trade paperbacks from these because i thought hey these have got enough mileage off of them but i couldn't bear to get rid of them because i mean look these these are my high school years right here i mean look how worn these bad boys are these are just like my star wars eu novels and that they have been torn up what i will say about the sequels is if you're going to read the sequels make sure you read messiah and children of doom together because it is one story doom messiah is basically a bridge novel to get two children of dune so make sure you commit to reading two and three if you read the sequels because it is a very satisfying heart if you read just messiah thinking that it is a sequel to dune you're gonna be let down by it but if you read children of dune and do messiah together you're going to love it and i cannot tell you what it was like to be 20 years old and trying to wrap my head around god emperor of dune i don't know if modern audiences can handle this book honestly there's a guy on the discord right now very young about the same age that i was when i read this series for the first time and he's got uh god emperor on his list next and i'm very interested to see what he thinks because at 20 years old reading god emperor doom was like now when you get to the next two i damn i'm kind of iffy on those you know i might revisit them sometime i don't know i think when i was in my 20s was the last time i had a full series reread i really felt like it should have ended after god emperor and i'm not going to get into the stuff that frank herbert's kid has done the bastardizing that he's done to the series so i can't even really go into that but look are the sequels bad no not at all they're just nothing like the first one also when you're talking about arguably the greatest science fiction now of all time how do you follow that up you know that's that's like your your first album is incredible and you're just gonna be pressured to always top that first album and it rarely ever happened but like i said i think that the uh the central focus of those stories completely shifting will throw some people off but look guys i do want to get into my final thoughts here and i say look dune changed my life and that is not hyperbole i know a lot of people say oh yeah that book's so great it changed my life they don't mean it i mean it with dune because it taught me two life lessons that i still use to this day when i was a very young man i had absolutely no confidence none i was always constantly afraid of failure and i'm sure you know where this is going by now even if you haven't read the book you know the fear the litany against fear which i will not fear fears of mine killed right everyone knows this i think that that's just like a big pop culture thing and people who've never read it like oh is that what that's from uh i thought that the litany just spoke to me when i was like i said first finding my confidence i could have put on a camera like this and talk back then anyway anything in life i was always afraid of failure i had the lowest self-esteem i came from a dysfunctional family i thought that life was crap and then i read this book and it taught me not to fear right and i i know that that sounds corny to some people but i took it to absolute heart it became like a mantra to me look the litany just spoke to me right it taught me that it's not wrong to experience fear you just need to acknowledge it for what it is and just assess the warnings that fear is crucial but let it letting it dictate us is is fatal you know and again i know that might sound kind of deep to the most because the kind of things i talk about in this channel but that's just how important this book is and it really is the only book i can think of that really taught me life lessons and the other one is it taught me not to trust and worship leaders because they're just people like you and i they're not a messiah you know that's the biggest takeaway don't blindly follow anyone don't follow some cult of personality think for yourself be a free thinker don't live in an echo chamber think for yourself don't trust leaders that is just humongous mantra that i've used my entire life so take that for what you will i'm sure you have your own thoughts of it but frank really he believed that power doesn't corrupt absolute but the power attracts the corruptable you know and that's a little different than most people would go with and uh like i said those are two lessons that i have put into my life every day since i was a teenager and not only did it help me overcome being just a big scaredy cat of everything i i believe it helped me find confidence it helped me overcome a lot of obstacles that i shouldn't have and it helped me not really repeat a lot of the mistakes that uh you know previous generations in my family have so if you think that's over the top praising a book for that i mean you might be watching the wrong channel because i do believe that a book can change someone's life with the words on it not just necessarily the story not just being like hey i'm going to role play and pretend that i'm this character no it's nothing like that but it's the lessons that this book had in it is what made it so special to me and it's why i think if you find something in there that you identify with anything close to how i identified with it it's going to be a book that you want to read over and over again because i truly believe every time that you read this book you will find something new that you didn't the last i've read this book 12 times and every time i come up with something new to take away from it that i didn't before and guys that is why i think that you should read dune by frank herbert now i'm going to do a full review for this where i'm going to get it to the story i'm going to break down the characters and i'm going to do more than just talk about the philosophical nature of this book i'm actually going to talk about the story so that will be coming sometime before the movie comes out like i said right now it says december i doubt that's going to happen but uh whenever it comes out i will start reviewing the doom books i'm going to do at least the first four that is the goal so guys remember to let the fear pass through you because only you will remain i'll talk to you guys in the comments i can't wait i hope you'll pick up the book i'll put the link below if you want to buy it it's an amazing book and i hope you enjoy it one tenth as much as i have over the last 25 years i'll talk to you [Music] then you

Channel: Mike's Book Reviews

Views: 84,692

Keywords: Review, Reaction, Reading, Books, recap, Mike's Book Reviews, Dune, frank herbert, denis villenueve, dune 2020, dune trailer, trailer, dune messiah, children of dune, god emperor of dune, Timothée Chalamet, paul atreides, fantasy, sci-fi, science-fiction, bene gesserit, Kwisatz Haderach, leto, atreides, alia, duncan idaho, harkonnen, spice, melange, sandworm, shai-halud, arrakis, gom jabbar, mindkiller, chapterhouse dune, heretics of dune, why you should read, should i read, brian herbert

Id: oOomSvGXfaM

Length: 28min 9sec (1689 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020