Tl;dr – Bolded paragraph. For context, this post is coming on the back of finishing Dune Messiah last night.
There was a bit of relief that I was feeling as I read through Messiah, and that feeling was, "I'm enjoying myself enough to finish this book, but I'm content with ending my pursuit of the Dune series once it's finished." I was plenty well aware that the series after book 1 is a bit polarizing, where book 1 is so highly-celebrated, but the execution of each subsequent book in the series seems to be widely disagreed-upon as to how worth reading they are.
I'm the kind of person who loves to see things through to their end, even when I know I'm likely to not enjoy where that journey takes me. So the looming 4 novels ahead of book 2 were weighing fairly heavily in my mind prior to starting Messiah over the weekend when I brought it home from the store. But like I said earlier, I felt relief as I was reading it, knowing that it wasn't compelling me enough to really care much about what happens once it's done.
However, somewhere around the 3/4 mark or so. Something shifted within me and suddenly I was FULLY invested. Something similar happened to me while first reading Dune a few months ago, but it happened around the 20% mark or so, which if it had happened much later, may have resulted in a DNF on my part. But instead, once I hit that 20% mark, I devoured the remaining 80% and it became one of my favorite novels.
I wouldn't say Messiah has become one of my favorite novels, but I'm thoroughly impressed by Herbert's ability to flip my interest/care completely on its head out of nowhere, especially after I was largely indifferent to the first 75% of the book. Took it from a 6/10 to a 7.5 or 8/10 for me personally, and I'm very glad that I read it.
I read a few different times that Messiah ends up feeling more like the 4th act of the original book rather than specifically a sequel, and in many ways I think that feels true to me. The abrupt ending of the original felt a little too quick and open-ended for the massive amount of build-up it took to get there, and I think Messiah fills in the rest of Paul's story in a cohesive and appropriate way for his character.
That said, I think I'm still content stopping here! At least for now anyway. I have too many unread books on my shelf to justify even considering another from the Dune series, let alone the subsequent 3 after that to "finish" the series in the sense of its full box set.
by PsyferRL