This was my second time reading this book, and you know, I think I liked it a little better this time. I was able to catch and appreciate some details early on that were important later, and I had a better understanding of what to expect, so some of the more confusing passages were easier to comprehend.

There's definitely some weirder stuff in this book, and I'm not sure I understood everything. Generally speaking, whenever Paul went into a trance and started seeing the future, I got a wee bit lost.

Probably my favorite thing about this book is the world that it's set in; very little context is given (until the delightfully detailed appendixes), but it's glaringly obvious that all of the casually mentioned events from the far past were well thought out and shaped how the world ended up.

I was also extremely impressed by the thinking through of the Guild monopoly; that was a detail that was so fascinating to think through the implications of, and it gave the story so much more realism and put constraints on some of the more obvious simple paths that could have otherwise been taken to solve problems.

So, in short, the worldbuilding is fantastic. At every point it feels so real; you can see that there are problems, that not everything went well in the past. Some authors I read (especially Asimov) have very cut-and-dried, simplified backstories that only exist to set up the story, but in Dune I really saw that a rigorously planned, realistic timeline existed, and it was fascinating to see the story flow around the figurative mountains that created rather than just changing the landscape.

Also, side note: Did you know that the Planitae (plains) and Labyrinthi (pretty much what it sounds like) on Titan (probably my favorite moon or planet in our Solar System) are named after planets from the Dune universe? I love the creativity that goes into Titan's nomenclature. (My favorite is that the mountains are named after Middle Earth mountains--Like Doom Mons! [i.e. Mount Doom])