I am so stuck.
| Not in knitting, though I am - I can't bring my self to do the math (ahem, counting) to cast on the last piece of gigi. No, in keeping with the completely off-topic posts genre of late, what I'm really stuck on is novels. When I stopped reading last night, I was not stuck. It seemed a perfectly reasonable, non-suspenseful place to break. One of the characters had done something a little odd - not really out of line with his personality, but not fully explained, and was off to do something else. So, that's fine - completely linear development is boring. A little suspense isn't a bad thing. Then, at random, halfway through my day at work, (yeah, it's a little slow at work recently, my mind's been wandering) I think I realized his motivation. And suddenly, it is NOT a little suspense. It is a lot of suspense. Not only omg, am I right, was it really that? But if it is what is he going to do now? And there is diddly I can do about it. Not until tomorrow morning or maybe even after that. Because, of course the book is at home, and tonight we're going to a friend's (to play D&D {nerd}) which I have been anticipating for most of the summer. And now I'll be distracted by wondering if I'm right about the book. We'll get home late, and tomorrow morning we need to clean in anticipation of having people over to watch football that evening. So I'm stuck. Bah. I wasn't originally going to mention what book I was reading, since it's irrelevant to my conundrum, and could be a little bit spoiler-ish (you know, if you happened to be in the exact same place I am or something). Plus, if I don't mention the book, it makes for easier deniability if I guessed wrong, or, you know, if everyone else realized that right off the bat. But really, it's not that big or obvious of a point to be recognizable - it just happened to be where I stopped, so I've changed my mind. I re-read Dune a bit ago. I still don't understand why it's so incredibly famous. It's a good book and all, but it doesn't feel that impressively unique. Maybe it just did a lot of these things first? I don't know where it falls in timelines. Anyway, this time I knew what I was getting into, so it went down a lot smoother. Enough that I plowed on into the sequels M has. I must say I did not like the first sequel. I think the only reason I kept going into the second was that I was sick, and it was there, and I really didn't want to watch more daytime t.v. Oddly enough, it was a good choice. It's like the ripped the original Dune in half, and put all the philosophical blather in one sequel, and all the plot and characters in the other (obviously, I prefer plot and characters - mostly characters - I'm a sucker for character). It's quite strange. So, as to why I bothered to write all that: If you thought Dune was passably good, but couldn't stand the sequel I would highly encourage you to try the third. You could even skip the second if it bored you too much. There are a few different characters that might be a little jarring, but they do a good job of explaining how that happened if you wait it out. It's almost as if they didn't expect you to actually read the second. All you will really miss is some development of Alia and her husband. (Actually, I did start reading the wrong one - our books are a bad printing - one cover says 'book three' the other says 'final in the trilogy' it took a bit to figure which was lying). Conversely, I suppose, if you thought the second book was a vast improvement, I wouldn't bother with the third.
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