It's been quite a long time since the last time I touched this blog of mine. I don't know exactly what restraints me from doing so, except that I felt extremely lazy to do it. This feeling is superimposed by the burden of my study which certainly does not help at all. But why, of all things, is this poor blog that's been conveniently put to blame for such a thing? Why didn't I choose my fondness of manga instead, which has my constantly addiction and full attention? I wish I could delve deeper for any satisfying answers for that...
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OK, OK.... enough rambling. Now that I have taken a little bit share of my interests to do anything decent to this poor Blog of mine, I would like to use this luxurious opportunity to tell you about something I am enjoying to do lately. That is reading science fiction & fantasy books. This hobby of mine has been strengthened by the availability of original books of this genre here in Europe. Although I have bought some SF/Fantasy books in Indonesia, but the availability is not as many as I would like to be. Thus, being in Dresden here, means that I have arguably better opportunity to fulfill my desire for such books. Another thing is the practical way to obtain the books in particular through online books stores such as Amazon or even the online auction site: E-Bay. For your information, right now I have obtained a complete collection of Dune Chronicles by Frank Herbert and also a complete collection of Dune prequels by his son Brian Herbert and another renowned SF author, Kevin J. Anderson. Overall there are six books of Dune Chronicles and another six books of Dune prequels. I just hope that my wife does not scold me for this.. :D
She knows best my "bad" addiction of those books, because it may make me to spend too much money on it... :)
My interest on the Dune series is accidentally aroused when I browsed through a bookstore next to Markplatz, Dresden. This bookstore has a quite a lot collection of books in English. (It is just because I am not able to enjoy reading in German yet, that I only focused on English books. If later I finally be able to do that, of course the German books will be considered too.. :)). Back to this bookstore, a section that I find compelling is of course the SF/fantasy section. One peculiar thing that I observed is that the tendency of books of this genre to be published in series, probably the most popular form is trilogy. I cannot reason this except to the assumption which I read somewhere, saying that publishing trilogy (or you can say, dividing a book/story into trilogy) can boost the buyers' interest. And I find that this reason is undeniably justified in the case of Dune prequels and Lord of The Rings. Probably, there are more example of this that you can find on other titles.
Back to this bookstore, I found myself interested in three books arranged together side by side on the shelf. These three books share the same title: DUNE. Some of you probably have heard a science fiction story which is also called the same name: Dune, which tells a story about human and sandworms living in some all-desert planet. Well, you have it almost right, because those three books is the prequel of this story. In fact, those three books are the most ancient in their timeline compared to the original Dune. And it turns out that these three books are a trilogy. At that moment, I decided that I must own these three books as my collection. Thus I bought those three, although I did not buy them at once, but one at a time.... :) And guess what? The story is so charming that I managed myself to look for and obtain the entire Dune series....!! So finally I must force myself to be satisfied with this, because I don't want to spend so deliberately my monthly allowances from my scholarship just for the sake of book collection.. :D (Even though right now, I have finished 10 out of those 12 books). I hope next time I can share what I find in this interesting series. Meanwhile to have a preliminary information, you are invited to visit:
Official Dune Website
The World of Dune
Or just google the word "Dune" and you will find all related links... :)
