Dune

Who knew that he was inspired by the DUNES OF OREGON! Woohoo! Those dunes are about 2 2/12 hours away from my house, and the first place we went back in the 70s when our friends moved to Florence, Oregon from sunny Southern California.

I was so shocked to discover that I really liked this book. I had started to watch the movie from the 80s several years ago, only to turn it off after five minutes. I was so pleasantly surprised at how the book drew me in and carried me along.

Science fiction is not my favorite genre, but Mustich has made me believe that there is value in reading it. I love to grow and learn. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Inspired by a visit to the famed sand dunes of Oregon, Herbert delved into research on environmental science and related matters as he began to chart the long, complex backstory of his epic, which ultimately came to span some twenty-one thousand years of future history. Through canny and judicious textual references throughout his saga, he would use the imaginative foundation his investigations provided to convince readers that they were entering a milieu as gloriously irreducible as the world outside their windows. Herbert’s interstellar empire is dominated by what amount to feuding royal households and a variety of guilds (space pilots, cerebral Mentats, Sardaukar warriors, the Bene Gesserit sisterhood of mind witches) under an overarching Emperor.