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Occasionally, Dune comes with some good advice...like:

• 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.

So I chose to read Frank Herbert's Dune for a class I'm taking through work and I simply cannot stand it.

I have tried to get into it at least half a dozen different times and have only managed about twenty pages during each attempt and now, two days before I'm supposed to have finished, I am less than half way from the end.

It's a hard book to read no matter how you feel about it, but even harder when your concentration level is not so high and you could care less about the characters and plot.

I thought looking to see what other people think about the novel (especially those who don't care for it, either) might help and there is a lot online (both good and bad).

Here are few things that jumped out at me:

-from a positive review (Jo Walton, Tor):

It’s an easy book to make fun of—ultra-baroque, ridiculously complex plotting, long pauses while people assess each other.

-On the Urban Dictionary website someone has defined "Dune" as a book that is overrated.

-This review is mostly in praise, but it does capture something I don't like about Frank Herbert's style:

George RR Martin’s hugely successful Game of Thrones novels clearly took some inspiration from Dune, right down to presenting each character’s inner thoughts as italicised sentences. It’s a style that makes Dune easy for infrequent readers to digest, but equally hard for literary readers to stomach.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/30/frank-herbert-dune-at-50-sci-fi-masterpiece

Oddly enough, despite how I don't like Dune, there are some quotes that are really speaking to me right now in my life. This is one of them:

“Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it. But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, these things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.”  

I really dislike quitting things so I am going to do my best to finish this today and tomorrow, but oh, what a slug-fest it feels like.

...

So, it's hours later and I'm still reading Dune (yay for reading 20 more pages and surging on) and I'm thinking wow, I still detest this book but it reminds me of "Star Wars" (which I also am not a big fan of...sci-fi sacrilege, I know) and so I go searching for that theory and find this:

http://dune2k.com/Community/Articles/StarWarsAndDune

I think it may be because I'm a little punchy from not sleeping last night and still being up now, but it felt like this big discovery, which of course is not...tons of people already knew this before me!