All Booked: Dare to Read Beyond ‘Dune’
Dating-App Foibles in the Literary World
This edition of All Booked was originally emailed to subscribers on February 8, 2022. To receive Emily Cosentino Lee and Caitlin Fitch’s literary newsletter in your inbox every other Tuesday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.
When my friend matches with a guy on a dating app, one of the questions she asks is, “Are you reading any good books right now?” Recently, though, the answer has become so unanimous it’s boring: “Dune,” they all say.
Over glasses of wine and a game of cards, she and I lament the fact that men on dating apps are mostly boring and that yes, Dune by Frank Herbert is an epic story, and yes, Timothée Chalamet plays a perfect Paul Atreides in the most recent, and highly impressive, rendition. But Herbert’s writing of Lady Jessica is disappointing, and the Fremen of Arrakis are portrayed terribly, and in the 1980s movie version, almost everyone is noticeably, and weirdly, white. And to top it all off, I’m pretty sure Herbert turned out to be a super-conservative, no-good scoundrel. I assume you know all of that by now and going over it in detail would be tangential to the point of this newsletter. Sigh.
