The iPad doesn’t feel like a computer. It feels like a magic book — like the ancestor of the Young Lady’s Primer in Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. It’s a book with hypertext everywhere, moving pictures and music and an infinity of content visible through its single morphing page. The sum is much weirder than the aggregate of its parts. Criticizing the iPad for not doing Netbook-or laptop-like things is like criticising an early Benz automobile for not having reins and a bale of hay for the horses: it’s a category error.
I do so love Dune, and I did like the David Lynch movie. The expanded series on the Sci-Fi channel was pretty good, too. I think I tried the second Dune novel but just couldn’t get into it…so I just re-read the original every few years or so.
I haven’t read Dune since high school, and for awhile I’ve been thinking I ought to revisit it, maybe even with an eye towards some of the sequels. (Though I think I’ll stop short of reading any of the hundreds of Anderson/Herbert sequels, prequels, and spinoffs.) I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen Lynch’s movie all the way through, or even which of a half dozen different versions of it if I have. I did like the first Sci-Fi miniseries, though I never watched its sequel — partly because I’ve never read those books.
I kind of recommend reading the original and skipping the sequels, myself.