This is the first audiobook I've ever listened to in my life (all 18 CDs!) as a result of a very unfortunate 3+ hr daily commute. I never realized how instinctively I assign spellings to unknown words and in the case of Dune, this made for some interesting realizations that might have not been so immediately obvious to me if I'd been reading like normal. Even now, I'm looking up words to spell them correctly, because it's clear that the author meant for these parallels to be drawn, but I'm still digesting the implications three days after I've finished the book. 
 Hearing the mixture of familiar and unfamiliar non-English terms is already strange, but I can't quite wrap my head around the fact that this is from 1965. The sheer amount of history and technological change that has happened since then makes for an interesting foil and really makes me appreciate the work more overall, although overall I felt that the plot followed some very formulaic narratives - Paul as the Chosen/Prophesied One,for example. But then, who is to say that the success of Dune itself didn't contribute to my feeling that it's formulaic? 
 In a way, I think the audiobook forced me to analyze the book more than I would have chosen to do so, because it would not have taken me 18 hours to actually read through it. Anyway, fortunately the voice actor was pretty great, although after a while Jessica/Alia/Chani all the women ended up sounding the same. (For the record, I totally thought those were spelled Aliyah and Chaney.) 
 I'm not sure what to make of the obviously intentional references - the Bene Gesserit ("good" Jesuit is how I translated it in my mind), Arrakis/Iraq, the use of terms like jihad, the spice/oil parallel. And can I point out once again that the novel is from 1965 which is a very different political climate than the 2016 or even the 2000s? It's a very weird feeling to read this work and know that it literally was for an audience a couple generations before my time; an audience that had not experienced 9/11 yet, the most recent Iraq war or even the 1991 conflicts, and just too much else to process. But WHY is this so weird? I'm not sure. It's not as if I haven't read other historical works. I think what makes Dune so fascinating and strange is that it feels both old and new. It's old in the sense that it's limited/stuck to 1965, but it's new in the sense that it was sci-fi of the time. Like the book itself, which has a strange mixture of the feudal/primitive/fantasy (barons, dukes, sand worms) and the far future science fiction (the suits, the terraforming, planetary conquests). 
 At times this novel reminded of just about everything from Star Wars to Game of Thrones/ASOIAF to even something as tangentially related as Karen Marie Moning's Fever series (Barron's use of the Voice), which I totally realize is backwards. What I'm seeing is most likely the legacy of Dune after it literally influenced generations of writers and creative artists. Unfortunately this, like the whole Chosen One/Prophesied/Messiah formula that I mentioned before, made it hard for me to really enjoy Dune. Admire it very much, yes. But simply enjoy it as entertainment? Well, it just feels a little dated somehow. As groundbreaking as many of the ideas were at the time for Dune, we've had 50 years' worth of further exploration by other authors. Even though this may be the original source material, the overall effect is that it was hard for me to get all that excited about these "old" and familiar ideas. 
 On a side note, I have a totally new and profound respect for the word moisture now and I think I may have been pronouncing "respite" incorrectly my entire life. Who knew it rhymed with spit, not spite? And WHY?