I want to talk about the experience of returning to Dune as an adult. I first read it at fourteen when someone at school handed it to me with the specific energy of an evangelist. I read it in three days and what I took away was the adventure, the ecology, the sense of a universe with depth.

Reading it at thirty-eight I took away almost none of those things. What I saw instead was a meditation on the costs of savior mythology. Paul is not the hero — he's the problem. Herbert keeps giving you moments of triumph and undercutting them, and at fourteen I took the triumph and skipped the undercut. At thirty-eight, the undercuts are the whole book.

This is what I mean when I say that some books are worth rereading. Not because the text changes but because you do. The book is a fixed point and you measure the distance you've traveled by how differently it reads.