The two best genres to prepare you for reading this are the most head-hopping danmei you can find and door-stopper western high fantasy. The writing style feels surprisingly modern in some ways--bits of it have osmosed their way into my own, even, perhaps from a common ancestor--but at the same I can see it as a clear midpoint between Lawrence of Arabia and Star Wars.

I also feel a certain kinship with the way Herbert spent so much of the book slowly setting things up, only to plow headlong through an ending that screams "I'm not done here but I have to send this thing out". Maybe in a different world, it could've been a tighter narrative, or more complex, or at least more of a story where all these important-feeling characters actually get to live up to that importance. I think I would've loved that! But we live in this world, where Herbert had 600 pages and still couldn't get anywhere close to finishing things, and... honestly, I'm okay with that.