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Comment by tnecniv | Hacker News Reader

Those are all great. I've also given Dune, the Forever War, and The Stars my Destination.

I used to give Dune to my teenage relatives and it usually turned them into avid readers; they would thank me later. I noticed that it doesn't hold the interests of the recent teenagers in the family; it is hard to get them to start and even harder to get them to finish. I think competition from the internet, youtube and cellphone is just too strong. That is horrible because developing a passion for reading helps lot in highschool/college/life. I've offered to pay them $100 and they still won't read it!

I recently read Dune (again). In my opinion, it hasn't held up well with the times.

I read most of the Dune books back when I was a teenager, and despite being a usually voracious reader I found them very hard to get into. Worth the effort, mind you, but it's definitely a series which requires some investment.

This is very close to how I feel about Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. I read them because many of my friends who were also sci-fi readers raved about them.

I enjoyed Red Mars but I really had to slog through Green Mars and Blue Mars. Red Mars was fun and interesting, but I could have done without a few hundred pages of Sax Russell talking about plants in Green Mars.

I think worldbuilding books take a certain level of investment, even among voracious readers.

Dune is very close to a revenge fantasy. I read it for the first time a year or two ago and was not particularly impressed.

I read a lot when I was a young teenager (pre-internet, and didn't have a TV, so I went through around a book a day). Much of it was SciFi.

I never found Dune all that great.

I enjoyed the first Dune book, solely on the amount of world building in the book. But I never read any of the others other than the 3rd one, as Herbert seemed to get a bit long in the tooth with all the grandiose plans involving the god emperor after a bit.

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