Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

I sold all of my KJA and Brian Herbert Dune books for $80 this summer. I have one of those collecting obsessions but I couldn't stand to see that crap sitting next to the originals anymore. I could never read those books a 2nd time.

Reading the prequels more than once

If it's because you didn't get everything you're a preeq!

Ash wrote:I sold all of my KJA and Brian Herbert Dune books for $80 this summer.

Smart. Some good came out of it.

And if there's people stupid enough to pay cashee-money for some of the worst writing in world history ... well, it's not your fault they're morons.

I thought I was ripping the guy off at the $80 price so I threw in my wife's Twilight books. I guess I cleaned out all of the bad authors from my bookshelf. Then I spent the $80 on EBay buying those Sci-Fi mags with Frank Herbert short stories in them.
BEST summer ever!

Ash wrote:I thought I was ripping the guy off at the $80 price so I threw in my wife's Twilight books.

that was the real rip off

It's probably why he got them to buy it though; I recently sold my collections seperately on Ebay as sets of Legends, Preludes and Dune 7 all for £0.99. It took several relistings.

your resilience paid off

Mine are still at my mum's place, awaiting autodafé(that I want to film to document the devastating effect of that drivel on any sane human mind)

My KJA/BH books have hidden from me out of fear.

lotek wrote:Mine are still at my mum's place, awaiting autodafé

It's what you oughtn't to do, but you do anyway!

HBJ

dunaddict wrote:I think it's safe to say most forummembers here have read the six real Dune novels numerous times.
The prequels are a different story. Would you read them again? Have you already done so? Why did you do it? How bad was it? Discuss...

Myself... I've read all the Dune novels at least twice (Dune and GE a lot more). The pre/se/interquels only once, and I can't bring myself to re-read them. I tried to pick up House Atreides again a while back, just to see if my recollection of it being the "best" of the prequels was still true. (And maybe discover a few new inconsistencies along the way. ) After three pages I thought to myself; I've got other, better things to read than this....

Has ANYONE here read a BH/KJA-word collection twice?

I've read the entire Dune series three times (I only read them for the first time in 2007), but have only read most of the nuDune books once. I skipped half of "Paul of Dune" (skipped all of the child Paul chapters) and didn't buy or read "Winds of Dune."

Since they are both not written by Frank Herbert and of poor quality, I find the nuDune books to be inconsequential and I won't waste time reading them anymore.

dunaddict wrote:

SandChigger wrote:Anything good in McDune comes from FH.

Logically, this means Brian Herbert = good...

Sorry, couldn't resist.

EDIT: Reading it again, I think my logic is flawed. If you had said "Anything from FH in McDune is good", then "Brian Herbert = good" is true.

I don't know, can you imagine how stupid Brian would be if FH weren't his father?

no one can!

and that too:

Nekhrun wrote:I don't know, can you imagine how stupid Brian would be if FH weren't his father?

Unfortunately FH's contribution to Brian and Penny (and through them to the rest of the family) was not simply an injection of genetic material. If we're honest, we have to acknowledge that FH himself played a role in shaping the personalities and characters of the people who are now reaping the benefits of the butt-hurting a stranger is perpetrating on his legacy.

Someone my GF works with overheard her say she was reading Dune and, meaning well, gave her a copy of House Harkonnen today. It was immediately given to me and has been stored with my collection of medical waste, next to the tub of smallpox, in case I need it for a flame war.

But I would never read it again just for the sake of reading it. It sucks, after all.

Thanks for taking that one out of circulation. The book I mean, not your girlfriend.

merkin muffley wrote:Someone my GF works with overheard her say she was reading Dune and, meaning well, gave her a copy of House Harkonnen today. It was immediately given to me and has been stored with my collection of medical waste, next to the tub of smallpox, in case I need it for a flame war.

But I would never read it again just for the sake of reading it. It sucks, after all.

That person was fired ... no?

Nekhrun wrote:Thanks for taking that one out of circulation. The book I mean, not your girlfriend.

Serkanner wrote: That person was fired ... no?

Mock execution. They won't do it again.

In preparation for filling in the synopses for the Legends books on HToD, I went through and marked and numbered the "chapters" (if you want to dignify them with that term) in the three books:

TBJ: 126 (prolog + 125); 675/126 = 5.36 pp/ch

MC: 118 (prolog + 117); 762/118 = 6.46 pp/ch

BoC: 117; 675/117 = 5.77 pp/ch

Those simple averages aren't really very informative, though. Particularly for TBJ, there's about a fourth of a page of blank space between the epigraph and the first line of text. And the chapters in all three books always begin on a new page, so there's often a lot of blank paper at the end of the previous chapter. I think I'm going to go through and estimate how much actual text there is in each chapter, work up some more accurate stats.

ANYTHING to avoid actually starting to reread them!

Seriously, though... WHO the fuck writes a book with more than 100 chapters?

SandChigger wrote:In preparation for filling in the synopses for the Legends books on HToD, I went through and marked and numbered the "chapters" (if you want to dignify them with that term) in the three books:
[...]
ANYTHING to avoid actually starting to reread them!

You don't really mean that. We know these synopses are just an excuse to read them again.
How else are you going to summarize the chapters without reading them?

SandChigger wrote: Seriously, though... WHO the fuck writes a book with more than 100 chapters?

I wouldn't mind 100 chapters.... if they were longer and their content was not just a summary of the previous chapters and novels.

100 chapters by ACTUAL, GOOD writers would be GREAT! (I've got just one chapter left to read in Surface Detail, for example. I WANT MORE BANKS! I WANT MORE CULTURE!!)

But we're talking the verbal Hershey squirts of the Great DICtahiker.

These guys don't know how to develop anything, hence a hundred five-page chapters of uninteresting events. It's impossible to read that shit.

The thing about their books is that while you can quote specific passages to show particularly awful writing, it's not *so* mind-numbingly dire that people immediately see the problem.

It's only when you endure page after page of flat, uninspired plots with cardboard characters and truly wretched dialogue that you realize what an appalling waste of potential these new Dune books are. Not just mediocre, but hundreds and hundreds of pages of mediocrity, never rising to an even basic level of adequate storytelling.

HBJ

I think what's starting to piss me off again is how blatantly they completely disregarded the Dune appendices in the Legends books, and how mind-fuckingly idiotic and unimaginative the shit they themselves came up with is.

I think the part that really burns is that clearly, they just don't care.

Passion for a story is absolutely 110% requisite for good storytelling, IMHO. You can't write well if you don't give a shit, no matter how talented you might be.

The combination of not giving a shit and lack of talent...well, we've seen what that produces. McDune.

SandChigger wrote:. . .there's about a fourth of a page of blank space between the epigraph and the first line of text. And the chapters in all three books always begin on a new page, so there's often a lot of blank paper at the end of the previous chapter. I think I'm going to go through and estimate how much actual text there is in each chapter, work up some more accurate stats.

It is oddly similar to the age old student tactic of shrinking the margins ever so slightly so as not to be noticed, or adding an extra line between the paragraphs (or my favourite) switching from Times New Roman to Courier font in order to add length to any paper that requires a certain amount of page length.