Friday reads, August 30, 2024: Books finished and in progress, new acquisitions and unhauls 

I just received my Everyman's Library version of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, so I am starting that this weekend. I am also working my way through Great Books of the Western World, and am currently on Plato's Apology. I have only recently discovered Mortimer Adler's program to become self-educated for those of us who were failed by the public school system.😂 Menagerie Manor sounds like a wonderful book for a homeshool assignment! Thank you for that recommendation. Pacing is *always * a problem with Stephen King as he never uses one word where 100 will do. The five Frank Herbert Dune books are my favorite SCI-FI series of all time. I have multiple different copies and even enthusiastically collected his son's (Brian Herbert) continuation/expansion novels. I would warn you away from those, his son has very little talent, which is likely why he waited until his father passed before capitalizing on his father's legacy and I regret wasting my money.

Second note: While Denis Villeneuve has done the best job of translating Dune from book to movie, some books just don't translate well into movies/TV. Another one that comes to mind is Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. The movie was a complete mess and confusing for anyone who was unfamiliar with the books because there was so much background that just cannot be conveyed through the visual medium. I hope you enjoy Dune as much as I did. There are several other books by Frank Herbert and I really enjoyed his style of prose.

Great finds Jim. Books are so much fun, aren’t they?

The only problem with watching other book tube channels is the ever expanding tbr! Best wishes.

My recent reading: Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea Current reading: Plato's Five Dialogues (The Death of Socrates), "The Manuscript Found In Saragossa," J.G. Ballard's "The Drowned World", Paul Thoreau's "Figures in A Landscape," Niall Ferguson's "Civilization," DFW's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," Pierre Burton's "My Country." On Going: The Bible, Shakespeare's plays, Arabian Nights, Edgar Allan Poe's complete stories and poems, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The Corfu Trilogy will be fun!As to Dune I have NEVER read it all the way through - always stalled. So I must re-visit.Some good books there, sir!

I'm a big nonfiction reader, so thanks for the Bakewell lead. Dune is about the only science fiction I've ever liked, and it's maybe my favorite book and series of all time. The movies have to cut so much out they really need to to do a television series to do it right. No spoilers, but Jessica is kind of a co-protagonist in the book, so they always cut her part down to focus on Paul for the movies. If you like David Lynch, his version is worth watching even though he's disavowed it (because he didn't have final cut). The visuals are really cool, the costumes are imaginative, and it looks horribly beautiful in an interesting way. But it was cut down from 4 hours to 2 hours. So the second half of the book is just done as a montage, and that really hurts the movie.

I enjoyed Lynch's Dune. Saw it in the theater and remember a character sheet being handed out. I knew that was a bad sign for the film's prospects.