Hello everyone:
I am surprised at the amount of the book we covered in class the other day - we actually took a good sampling of many different themes and ideas from the book as a whole. I really enjoyed talking about the *crazy* Appendix about the Bene Gesserit, where all of our comments about the veracity/falsehood of the story as presented were kind of unraveled. There were several people in the class who felt the book was more of a historical/academic document (myself included), and people who felt it was more of a mythical-ized version of the truth, but then we talked about who the implied author actually might be. I mean, pretty much all of our notions fell apart when we spoke of parts like Dr. Yueh's happenstance confession of his crimes, both aloud and internally (which we as the readers could somehow hear) to Paul's thoughts and Jessica's thoughts at the same time. This odd sort of dynamic was kind of flopping about without direction in the discussion, and then we read the whole Appendix. And we got to the part about the higher plans being fulfilled, at which point several people either looked REALLY introspective, or made some sort of verbal acknowledgment of the sudden possibilities made by considering this statement - not things that usually happen in a 2-hour long book discussion near the end. Certainly, I was surprised by this, even though I have read the book a few times - somehow this seemingly little (but actually REALLY IMPORTANT) things slipped past me.
Overall, I think its a great book, one of my favorites; even more so having discussed it with 20 other people.
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2 comments:
I totally agree that this is probably one of the best books I have read. It was really good while I was reading it but when we got deep into the discussion and all of the various ways virtually every detail could be taken, it took the work to a whole other plane. I also found it quite quirky, in a good way, that each appendix was so important to the understanding of the book.
Yay appendixes! Always fun to see what the author thinks needs more explanation. And great for looking in just one place to find things to post about.
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