Dune And The Technic History

I saw what looked like a deluxe edition of Frank Herbert's Dune, "NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE," in a Waterstones Bookshop window. After its three screen dramatizations, I am struggling to reread the Dune series. Near the end of Children of Dune, I find it difficult either to understand or to care about what is going on. What are the tenets of the Muad'Dib religion? How does this belief affect the lives of people on Arrakis and elsewhere in the Empire? Much important action seems to occur off-stage.

Poul Anderson's The Day Of Their Return does convey a strong sense of the beliefs and aspirations of particular individuals in diverse Aenean ethnicities engulfed by their distinctive millenarianisms, Christian, pagan, philosophical and esoteric. Before that, in Anderson's Technic History, there had been a long sweep of history from the last days of the Polesotechnic League through the two-stage colonization of Avalon, the Time of Troubles and the early Terran Empire to the Terran War on Avalon. After that, the Flandry period includes the upheavals on Aeneas. 

I feel that I am wading through desert sand in Dune but soaring with Ythrians in the Technic History.