Literary Crushes
Day 1. I’ll be posting one a day for the next ten days–a list of my top ten completely platonic and not in any way obsessive literary crushes. Here follow my all-time favorite cerebral, brooding, and sometimes tragic heroes in my very favorite books about them.
Paul Atreides (Muad’dib). Dune by Frank Herbert. Paul’s father, Duke Leto, has been given the desert planet Arrakis, called Dune, from which is harvested the universe’s only source of spice, the fuel that drives space flight. But when the enemy house Harkonnen hatches an assassination plot, Paul and his mother Jessica escape into the desert, where in order to win the loyalty of the Fremen, the only people who possess true desert power, Paul must become a messiah. In the course of Paul’s holy war, his visions turn him into something even more powerful than a prophet. Here, in the greatest science fiction epic, the fate of civilization turns upon a knife’s point.
Key points: deserts, anguish, visions, child genius, political struggles, epic, espionage
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