Finished Dune! (At least technically; I listened to the last couple of hours on a late flight and suspect I may have dozed off at points? That, or there are some weird time skips, which I also can't discount because there were previously some weird time skips even when I was paying attention— look, I know I've been referring to Paul as Space Jesus, but I really didn't expect an actual resurrection.) My biggest takeaway is that there are fascinating (in a bewildered-to-derogatory sense) things going on in this book, gender-wise: Frank Herbert has written this all-powerful order of, like, magical female Freemasons, and Paul's whole thing is that he's the one (1) guy who can achieve (and surpass/perfect?) their exclusively "feminine" powers, but also I feel like the narrative just has such contempt for the handful of women in it, except maybe Alia...?

Finished The Angel Experiment - book one of James Patterson's YA series about Maximum "Max" Ride, a teenage avian-human hybrid on the run from mad scientists and also her destiny to Save The World - and ended up reading the equally if not even more batshit sequel, School's Out Forever (2006). (The School is the laboratory where Max and the rest of her "flock" were created and spent the first two to ten(?) years of their lives as twisted science experiments (!); Patterson apparently really likes the "school's out" joke because he used it in the first book, too, although this one does also feature an actual school.)

( Highlights )

Currently (re-)reading The Far Side of the World by Patrick O'Brian, which so far is the second book I've read this year to feature extensive info-dumping about the 19th century whaling industry. Also started reading The Book of Love by Kelly Link; I'm only a few chapters in but it's already, like, heart-bursting-ly good.

Continued my nostalgic re-reads of formative 2000s YA with A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper, a novel about the impoverished, eccentric royal family of a very small island - think Gibraltar, but legally independent, mostly abandoned, and on the other side of Spain? - in the years before WWII, in the form of the diary of 16-year-old princess Sophia FitzOsborne. (I only realized years after originally reading this how much it owes to Dodie Smith's I Capture The Castle, which I've still never actually read.) This holds up delightfully, although it feels almost embarrassingly self-indulgent, in terms of realizing how precisely it's calibrated to appeal to a certain type of teenage girl and how precisely I was part of that target audience, which might be best described as "former American Girl and Dear America girlies." (And, I suspect, Samantha girlies in particular?) Like, it's just sooo.... she's an orphan living in a crumbling castle (with secret tunnels, a slightly unhinged housekeeper, and possibly ghosts) on an isolated island! She feels herself the too-ordinary middle child among her more talented/charming/outrageous/etc. siblings and cousins, but she's our protagonist, of course she has hidden depths! Plot threads include Sophie's crush on slightly older family friend Simon,* whether to move to London to be Presented Into Society as her aunt insists,** and the looming specter of real-world 1930s geopolitics— the boiling-pot build-up to, you know, WWII - a reference to the fascist sympathies of the British upper class in one of Sophie's brother's letters here, a piece of news there - is chilling, but things get dramatic very quickly when two lost German "historians" (or so they claim) wash ashore.

( Footnotes )