Continuing my nostalgic 2000s YA re-reads with Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment by James Patterson, a 2005 YA sci-fi/fantasy thriller about a group of young avian-human hybrids - so, human children/teenagers with wings, and other powers - on the run from the mad scientists who created them. I was briefly obsessed with this series in middle school but could not tell you a single thing that happened in it, so I did go into this expecting it to be at best entertainingly batshit and more likely just plain bad. And it's definitely not, you know, good— main character Max's narrative voice is so, so annoying, almost a parody of a Snarky 2000s YA Protagonist Voice, with a heavy dash of "hello, fellow kids!" cringe (examples: "I guess if I was more of a fembot it would bother me that a blind guy six months younger than I am could cook better than I could. But I'm not. So it didn't." and "So long, cretins, I thought. School is out— forever"); the rest of the dialogue is not much better, and no book has ever suffered so much from its characters not being allowed to swear— but I'm enjoying the actual plot (indeed entertainingly batshit) more than I had expected.

Finally picked back up where I'd left off *mumble* months ago in Bleak House, because— on the theory that since I clearly was not going to continue Bleak House at any point in the foreseeable future, I might as well try a different Dickens novel— I read a few chapters of Oliver Twist and realized that yeah, no, I'd much rather read Bleak House (or, to be honest, literally anything else).

Currently reading Days of the Dead by Barbara Hambly, one of her Benjamin January historical mysteries, usually set in 1830s New Orleans, although this one sees newlyweds January and Rose take a busman's honeymoon to Mexico to rescue their friend Hannibal Sefton, who has been accused of murder. Enjoying this! It's very Gothic: the mad patriarch ruling over his isolated hacienda with an iron fist, where pretty much everyone else is on their way to madness if not already there; the picturesque ruins in the form of Aztec pyramids; and of course, People Getting Real Weird With Religion. So far, this book's historical cameo has been General Santa Anna, who I did not connect with the sea shanty "Santiana" until a reference to his nickname as "Napoleon of the West"; I've also noticed that Hambly has an apparent running joke with herself of slipping in the names of minor characters from Les Mis (e.g., Combeferre's Livery in Die Upon A Kiss) and assumed the French chef named Guillenormand was one of those, although the spelling differs slightly— and as this Guillenormand is a "heretic Revolutionist" who fled France upon the Bourbons' return to power, I doubt Hugo's Gillenormand would acknowledge any relation.

I'm approximately three-quarters through Dune and things have gotten really weird. (Jessica + the Water of Life ritual????) Also, oddly, this audiobook keeps slipping back and forth between using a full cast of different voice actors for the different characters and having a single narrator Doing Voices for all the characters, which has a very odd effect when it changes from scene to scene and the main narrator has a completely different way of reading, e.g., Count Fenring's verbal tic than the other, specific voice actor does. It has also introduced more of a soundscape, including (in a move so cliche it was accidentally funny) ambiguously exotic flute music when Paul's Fremen love interest Zendaya Chani was introduced. So far my favorite chapter/scene has been when Frank Herbert used one character's death to be like "AND IN THIS ESSAY I WILL—" about ecology, via that guy's dying hallucinations of his dead father.