I tried to read you. Couldn’t get through you. Did I even get past Chapter One?
For some reason we never hit it off, did we ‘Dune’?
It all began when someone I admired said they’d read you.
It was Holly Johnson from Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It was an answer to a question in one of those pop music magazine bio’s. There were questions like ‘What’s your favourite colour? What book are you reading at the moment?’ This would have been in the mid eighties.
So, I did the natural thing, I went out, saved my pocket money and blew a few weeks worth on Dune by Frank Herbert.
Anyway, couldn’t get through Dune, gave it away in the end. My motivations for having the book were all wrong. I just wanted it because Holly had read it. How shallow. How silly. How embarressing but looking back, in my defense, I was fourteen and smitten.
The same thing happened when I was about eighteen with ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanphropists’ by Robert Tressell. About five different people recommended it to me, including my dad. So I bought it and couldn’t get past Chapter One.
I discovered that a couple of other people I knew had tried reading ‘Dune’ but couldn’t get through it, and they were hard core fantasy/sci fi fans. So then, I didn’t feel quite so bad. Interestingly enough, some of those people were able to get through it easily enough on audiobook.
I’m not an audiobook type of person but I might just buy ‘Dune’ again and this time just buckle down and also read ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ because I’m no longer a teenager, a lot of water has gone under the bridge and I’m not idolizing pop groups anymore.
When I start a book, I like to follow it through to the end, the ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ mentality but sometimes, just sometimes in life, there remains the great unread.
Things In My Head 