Reading Dune with a Notebook
A series this large punishes the reader who relies on memory alone. By the fourth book you have more names, more institutions and more history than most people can hold, and the books are built so that you will need written notes. This is the practical post, the one I promised myself I would write once the season's readings were done.
Keep it simple. One page per book, headed with the title and the year of publication, and on that page three lists. First, the people: who mattered, who lied, who died, and how each one is related to the others. Second, the claims: what each character believes to be true at the start of the book, so that you can catch the moment a belief breaks. Third, the machinery: who holds what power, which institution sits above which, and what the substance, the water and the money are worth. Those three lists are the whole series in miniature, and the third one is the one readers skip and then wish they had not.
Keep a fourth column, headed with the word question, and be ruthless in it. The books reward the reader who notices what they have not understood. When a passage leaves you cold, write the question down and do not go looking for an answer until you have finished the chapter. Half the pleasure of this series is the delayed comprehension, the moment three hundred pages later when a detail from the first book suddenly arranges itself.
Two practical warnings. Do not read an adaptation and the book in parallel; you will end up checking the screen version against the page and stop reading. And do not keep a running list of favourite lines. The series is full of lines that sound magnificent alone and mean much less when you have forgotten who is speaking and what they want.
That is the season's note, and it is a plain one. Read in order, write more than you think you need, and let the middle four books have their slow season without you hurrying them along. The rewards in this series are all long-range. A notebook is simply the tool that lets you collect them.