17th entry for 16th April

After finishing the complete Dune saga by Frank Herbert last December, I supposed I'll find myself uncomfortable being left without the 'never ending story'. I was fourteen when I bought its first volume, inspired by a computer game's unusual atmosphere. I was amazed after the first few pages. I loved the whole concept and all the ideas of that 'irregular' type of future. In Dune, most of the technology we'd imagine in our futures – including computer technology – was made obsolete by the very thing it was supposed to surpass: the well-bred and well-trained human body and mind.

Then, there was much more to come. All the thoughts, conversations and acts of those super-conscious characters are so inspiring that they enhance one's intellect on an unconscious level. I've never experienced that reading any other novels. It was somewhat surprising to learn later that it was an effect on which the author has banked upon writing Dune. It wasn't a book to tell me all the mysteries of the Universe, of course, but from time to time, I continued getting new pieces of the six-volume saga and reading them, getting that special state of mind and way of thinking again for a few weeks at a time. I was more than twenty when I had a final restart in reading the series, feeling able at last to comprehend every single sentence of it. What have I learnt of this story of five thousand years? I guess there's no way of telling it without telling 'just read it all'. It doesn't cover even the whole of the human world, yet it seems to penetrate through all the frivolous problems of the 21st century.

After all, it has left a feeling that it has taught me everything I'll need to live without the story that took eleven years to read and seemed never to end. Reading some of Herbert's short stories in English, however, I just can't refuse reading some of his other novels without translation.