With Paul seemingly dead, it is up to his now teenage children to continue his legacy. Their aunt Alia is showing signs of possession and their grandmother Jessica is ending her self imposed exile from Dune to visit them. With everyone having their own plans for the twins, the two prescient offspring of Paul (armed with all of his knowledge and abilities) put into effect their own plans:

The Golden Path, the salvation of the human race and the single most disruptive event in the course of the Dune Universe.

The further adventures of Paul Muad’Dib. Overthrowing the galactic government and setting up a religion based monarchy was the easy part. Now that he is in power, Paul fights to maintain a stable universe in the face of multiple conspiracies against him. With his wife pregnant, and cracks forming in his once loyal Fremen, all of his plans become very complicated.

I love the Dune series, but what I love most of all is this one. This book not only gets it all started, it is clearly the best of the series. Mixing science fiction, politics, religious topics, and…well….giant sand worms, this books juggles a massive array of characters who all pretty much end up well developed and interesting. Not as philosophical as some of the later books, there is a pretty good balance of action, explanation, character development, and back-story development.

Word of warning, once you read this book you will likely want to read the others to find out what happens next (or leading up to it, as the case may be). There are well over 10 books now, and I believe two more on the way, so if you are compulsive about this sort of thing, consider the financial and time investment.

I don’t care how weird this book seems to be on the surface, it is one of the funniest I have ever read. James takes pictures and descriptions from recipe books of yesteryear (defined as any time before I was born) and just makes fun of them. Sometimes the excerpts are funny enough by themselves and require no commentary. Consider this MST3K for food, an idea who’s time has come.

Covering Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, AIX (woohoo) and HP-UX, this is a handy little pocket reference for most normal system administration tasks. Almost like a book full of manpages for each OS, this is something I tend to never be too far away from.

Second to the last book. This one is by far the most intense, eye opening, and interesting book of them all. The rest of the world is now aware that Lord V has returned, and Harry has several times stopped his efforts to wreck havoc, but he is still not believed by the adults trying to run the show. Gone is the brooding, depressed Harry from the last book, now he is pissed, frustrated with bumbling wizards in positions of authority, and for the first time seriously taking control of his destiny. Dumbledore reveals to him what has been happening all along (it was not what anyone thought) and gives him direction and a plan for the final battle. The next book will be the last one, and it is going to have to be pretty impressive to tie up the mess everyone finds themselves in at the end of this one.

Currently my favorite Potter book. Harry takes a major moody turn (and frankly given his age and what has been happening to him, he deserves to), an organization has formed to help fight Lord V but most of the world does not believe he has returned. It is of course in the government’s best interest to deny this, because it is supposed to be their job to protect against. As a result they (through the media) are actively encouraging the belief that Harry is delusional, attention seeking, lying, or all three.

This, combined with the fact that it is no longer Harry and a couple of friends against evil, but a group of adults running the Order, puts Harry into a more passive role regarding his fate. He does not react well to all of this, and it almost leads to his downfall. Again, the story is intense, the plot is gripping, and the story arc is advancing at an alarming rate.

At this point the story really started in book 3 begins ramping up. Again we have a lot of back-story and information being pumped out, and for the first time we start seeing elements in the story happening from another person’s perspective. Who’s perspective? The villain who we truly have not seen acting as a villain yet. He makes a massive appearance and the endgame between Lord V and Harry begins.

This book also marks the point in the story arc where it takes a drastic “from PG to PC13 or R” turn. Make no mistake, people die, scary stuff happens, and a teenager is put into positions that most adults would collapse under. At this point it is no longer a story for grade school children, it is a story that is growing up with children who are Harry’s age.

For me, this is where the story really took off. The first two I was mildly interested in, both being good reads. However this is the first one I literally could not stop reading. I don’t mean that figuratively, I skipped a night of sleep to finish this book.

Characters (seemingly) fully developed, the story arc takes off full swing. Bits of back-story and plot information that were once rolled out piecemeal during the first two books, are now fired at you like a machine gun. Quite simply, after reading this book, I was addicted, and I knew I had to find out how all of this ended.

In the grand scheme of things, this book really just serves a similar purpose to the first book. The characters, having been introduced are now going to get developed further. The overall plot will begin to be slowly revealed (as it will over the next few books).

Unlike rest of the series, this one always seemed a bit out of place to me. I cannot quite explain why, perhaps it is a bit like Babylon 5 where over the course of 5 seasons there were certain episodes integral to the long term story arc, and many that were just thrown in to tell side stories. This book always seemed that way. (Note: I just realized there is probably a small number of people reading Harry Potter AND who are familiar with the entire Babylon 5 series story arc).

At least I used to think this. After reading “The Half Blood Prince” I am beginning to think this story was actually more important than it seemed at the the time and perhaps much more was revealed in it than seemed to be on the surface.