Well, my blogging came to a screeching halt as my workload climbed to the roof. But I have been doing some reading, and so…

In our last episode, I had finished Memoirs of a Geisha, and was back to checking out the Dragonquest series. Having wrapped up Dragonsong, I picked up Dragon Drums, which was about another renegade kid, but this time a kid who excelled and therefore was a target for other jealous kids. Piemur is taken under the wing of older wiser folks on Pern, and lives a pretty interesting life for a teenager. Lots of histrionics from some background characters (who I think are foreground characters in the first book in the series, but I never found it, and read it some twenty years ago or so), which was pretty much like histrionics in real life: a waste of time, irritating, and kind of a bore. But the foreground story was a good one.

So, I launched into The White Dragon with some enthusiasm. Well, not quite as good a read as Dragon Drums or Dragonsong, but it was an interesting story about exploration, class politics, resistance to innovation and change, and coming of age for various characters.

But I was glad to finish the book, to take a vacation from Pern for a while (there are quite a few more books in the series). Sometimes McCaffrey over-explains things – rather than just focusing on the salient moments, scene after scene is filled with (in my humble opinion, and after all, I’m no published author) unnecessary rambling, dialogue about mundane details. Rather than just giving a backdrop and character (a context) to the story, much of it feels like the kind of stuff you sit politely through because you don’t know exactly how to leave the room gracefully. Of course, being a story, it goes on for a few minutes here and there, not hours like in real life when some elderly and ponderous relative details out the Good Old Days for an entire hot sticky afternoon. But it makes me appreciate an author who can pin down just enough, and not much more, than is needed to give life to their imagined universe.

With The White Dragon safely back on the bookshelf (okay, okay, it lounged on the coffee table for a few days first), I started up Dune for the Reading Group at Worm’s SciFi Haven, where I am a regular visitor.

I have lost count, again, of how many times I’ve read Dune. It’s getting up around fifteen, give or take, over the last thirty-plus years. I read it not all that long ago, and it stills thrills me, pulls me through from scene to scene even though I know not just the general plot but the exact phrasing of a great proportion of the story. Herbert is definitely an author who knows how to present context without over-dwelling on the mundane. A well-written story, a true classic in both fiction and science fiction. A familiar universe, a Duniverse to visit again and again. * Happy Sigh *

A note here: my stepfather, who can count the number of fiction books he’s read by choice (as opposed to in college) on one hand, none-the-less read and thoroughly enjoyed Dune. This was many years ago, and his inspiration to pick up the book came from seeing Frank Herbert give a lecture on ecological and land use planning at some meeting in the Puget Sound. Must have been back in the 1980s. Any way, it’s always been a telling thing to me: that for someone rooted in the real, and who never read fiction and especially not science fiction, Dune was none-the-less accessible.

I debate about going on into the rest of the series. It’s only been about a year since I traversed my way from book one to book six. I don’t want to burn myself out on this beloved series. I may hold off for a while.

While I debate about what serious fiction venture I get into, I took a look at a book from the late 1940s which was recommended highly by a friend: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. Sort of a mass-die-out of humans, what do the survivors do now? story, from what I’ve read. I can’t decide if I’m in the mood or not, which upon reflection is not the best way to start a story. Witness the fact that I took an old favorite with me, Samuel R. Delaney’s Neveryona, when I went out to eat. A wonderfully delightful guilty pleasure of mine: a nice ordinary meal in a restaurant with a good book, and this week, in the air conditioning. 105 degrees f. and 82% humidity yesterday, almost as bad the day before, and today was not much better. At midnight, the temperature is over 70 degrees outside, and much hotter indoors.

Back to Dune: What this read did do for me was inspire me to get some of my links together, things I’ve created, including a slightly amplified version of Willis McNelly’s Dune Timeline (includes our calendar year dating system along with the one from the book), and started a Sister Artemis home page over at Comcast. Not looking too spiff at the moment, but I only started it today.  I only have a few minutes a day to work on this sort of stuff, but it is fun.