Dune

Executive Summary: I enjoyed this book. It's not one of my new favorites or anything, but it was good. I'd recommend people read it, but won't start advocating it as a must read.Audiobook: I did the unabridged audio book from Audible. This version had multiple readers. There was the main narrator, and a secondary narrator for all the various excerpts written by Princess Irulan.They also had readers for most of the main characters. Some of the conversations were more like a radio program than a book with the readers conversing with each other as the characters would. The confusing thing to me was sometimes the dialogue used the multiple readers, and sometimes it didn't and was simply read by the main narrator. At first I thought it was maybe for internal dialogue, but that wasn't always the case. I never could figure out the pattern as to why they didn't simply use the multiple readers for every conversation.Full ReviewThis is a book that seems to always finish top 5 in many best of type lists. It's one of my friend's favorites. I got a free audiobook from Audible thanks to the Sword and Laser podcast and I needed a book for my Christmas road trip, so this seemed like a good fit.I really enjoyed all the plotting and politics involved in this book. There was also an interesting array of characters with different backgrounds and desires that often lead to confrontation. This reminds me a lot of Star Trek DS9 or Babylon 5 which I wouldn't be surprised to find were inspired by Dune. Often times the science fiction takes a back seat to the conflict. It's more of a sci-fi setting than a sci-fi story. It shows that even on another planet with strange creatures and technology that greed, honor, war, revenge and many other Human behaviors are really just the same no matter what the setting.If I had any one gripe about the book it was lack of detail in the ending. Everything that has building comes to a head and seems to be over in short order. The ending itself wasn't a disappointment, but I felt like the execution was lacking. This might be what made this book a 4 instead of a 5. It's hard to really say.I may read the second book [b:Dune Messiah 106 Dune Messiah (Dune Chronicles, #2) Frank Herbert http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347771287s/106.jpg 3634570] since my friend who loves this series said it is really the second half to this book.I've also got the movie coming from Netflix this weekend so I can re-watch it after reading the book. I hope that I'll enjoy it a lot more than I did back in college, now that I have a clue what I'm watching. :)