02A56: The Waters of My Childhood

Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 584

As soon as I finish my current BattleTech novel, I'm going to re-read Dune. I'm kind of tempted to pause in my reading and jump back to Frank Herbert's world, but there's a proper time for everything. I guess watching the new movie has me eager to re-live the original story experience that had affected me so deeply all those years ago.

I've lost count of the number of times I've read the core Dune books. I had pretty much made it a habit to re-read it every year for a good chunk of my life because I'd pick up new insights every time. When I became a lot more "aggressive" about my annual reading goals, the thought of re-reading books didn't immediately occur to me as I was very focused on getting through all my newer purchases and my never-ending to-read pile.

Various Kindle sales have resulted in me owning both physical and digital copies of the books, so re-reading is going to be a lot easier. As much as my older copies have a rich smell about them that my mind has come to associate with this fictional desert world, I concede that my eyes would much prefer the e-reader experience.

One of my main challenges while watching the new movie is how I kept looking for particular scenes or lines of dialog. Being such a fan of the books also means that I have a deep love for the text. It somewhat hurt me every time lines I looked forward to either did not make it into the movie or were delivered in a manner that didn't make them feel as important as they are in my mind. I can take things looking different from other depictions of Dune or even characters being absent from the movie entirely. But it's the changes to the words that still sort of jarred me more. 

Again, it's still a good movie and I enjoyed it enough to actually watch it twice just to cover certain bits. And I'd love to see it again in a proper movie theater given the chance to do so safely. But for now, what I most want to do is to lose myself in the words again and feel like I'm in the fourth grade again with a battered copy of Dune in hand as the text opened my eyes to many things and perhaps continues to do so even after all these years.