[KiwiHopeful]

Selchie, I highly recommend them. Not so much for the philosophical point of view they present--anyone can make up their own mind about that--but for the storytelling. The series is filled with lots of good old-fashioned white-knuckle cliff hangers and heroic moments. I couldn't put them down. I finished the second one on a Sunday night and was seriously considering driving 40 minutes to the nearest Barnes & Noble on the hope that they'd still be open and have a copy of the last book--even though I new I could get the last one from school the next day.

E-B, as for the point of the first book, I'm not sure what your hubby meant (as I haven't seen the movie yet). But I wouldn't doubt that the filmmakers got a lot of it wrong. I've always thought that the challenge of making a movie of this book isn't the special effects (clearly Hollywood and Wellywood) have a handle on that these days. What they haven't figured out is how to mix big ideas and filmmaking without turning those big ideas into simple, bumper sticker length messages. (I'm thinking films like Narnia and Crash, which was about racism like a 'Dog is My Copilot' bumper sticker is about the struggles of finding meaning in the modern world).

'Dune' is a good example of an essentially unfilmable book. Try to engage the ideas and you get the enigma David Lynch created. Ignore them, and you get the Sci-Fi Channel's adaptation of the books. But neither compares to the book.