Herbert's way of writing characters and dialogue is halfway to being excerpts from an old religious text, which is of course in part the point, but it makes everyone involved an inhuman avatar of some concept or set of ideals instead of people. It's the ideas that matter, but finding a reason to care about the outcomes of the ideas depend on being invested in the Dune universe and cast of characters, so it's a recursive problem.
I stuck with this because I was assured by fans there's a payoff in God Emperor of Dune. I sure hope so. ( )

I struggled with this book. The Dune is multilayer book, this book IMHO dissects every layer. I have to admit it wasn't easy to keep up with the politics, religion, geography, Muad'Dib's children and the Future of the Arrakis. Challenging and very interesting book. ( )

The best book I've ever understood about 1/3 of. CoD is gripping and fascinating until the end, and gets deeper and stranger than either of its predecessors. It also leaves a lot unanswered, but that's to be expected both from the 3rd book in a series of six, and from a Dune book generally apparently. Amazing read, and one I'll likely read again. ( )

There are some slow parts that made me want to give up but otherwise I enjoyed it. ( )

When I saw the new Dune film I felt like I needed to revisit this series. I usually tell people that Dune is my favorite book and I think that's still mostly true. I read Dune Messiah years ago and it kind of turned me off the series. My return to Children of Dune has left me a bit stunned and unsettled. This one had more action than Dune Messiah, which was one of the reasons I didn't particularly enjoy it. There are also so many hilariously weird things that really just made me love it more: an empress with multiple personalities who is married to the resurrected warrior turned human calculator. The empress' neice and nephew that hatch a plan to turn one of them into a superhuman man-worm to save the universe, the grandmother of all them who sits by and watches in horror as they all try to kill and kidnap each other and her. One funny moment I had was when the Laza tigers showed up. I was listening to the audiobook and it was pronounced Laser Tigers. I had a good laugh at how ridiculous the name was and the tried to Google them to see if anyone had drawn their interpretation and found how it was spelled in print. ( )