Air Travel and Reading

I bring a lot of reading materials with me when I travel. All year round I maintain a "vacation reading" pile at home and from which I pick a few really appealing ones to take with me. I try to avoid hardcovers to keep the bags light as I travel light. In domestic travel on the plane readers of Da Vinci Code, Why Men Love Bitches and The Devil Wears Prada usually engulf me while I'm plowing through eclectic, nerdy titles like Introduction to Literary Theory. A couple years ago it used to be The Lovely Bones which topped all bestseller charts and pervaded into most of the book clubs. I find international travelers not as bent on reading as the domestic ones do, although they read crappy, C grade pocket fictions. International travelers might be glued to their personal entertainment screen on a long-haul flight like the one I take to Hong Kong, which pulled out of San Francisco shortly after midnight and arrived 14.5 hours later in the crack of dawn. I usually passed supper, which was served about an hour after takeoff as the giant 747 reached its navigation altitude, at 35000 feet. I would sleep through the first half of the flight and wake up just about when I crossed the international date line!

The clip-on itty-bitty reading light is a godsend especially when the overhead the yellow patch of the reading light is a bit titled over and shines on the snoring person next to you. Also some of the jetliners have definitely seen better days so the reading lights might not even function properly. So I would put on my headphones and turn on the shuffle mode of my iPod and start reading. I read Memoirs of a Geisha during my most recent flight to Asia, along with The Advocate, and sometimes Cargo (so is it really a gay icon?), depending on whichever I can find at the bookstores in the departure hall. I also read Brokeback Mountain on another flight and the cowboy makeout scene just exert way too much tension on my pants! I wrote the original journal entry on Brokeback Mountain which spurred on to become a full review on the plane.

I also have a predilection for James and Trollope when I fly: a long, hearty novel with rich, meandering prose, prose that is carefully constructed as if it is not aimed for the audience or storytelling but to achieve literary erudition. I am currently reading Wings of the Dove, the story of Milly Theale, a naive, doomed American heiress and a pair of lovers who conspire to inveigle her fortune. I simply can't put this crafted witty tragedy off until I sit in the Author's Lounge at The Oriental in Bangkok! Travel for me is the time for reading, in addition to the sightseeing and fun. Reading on a plane with a flight full of people falling asleep creates that mysterious silence that renders an immense excursion for the spirit of a reader possible. It's that solitude, the quiet of the mind with which I can concentrate on the book among a crowded consciousness.

What do you plan to read on your next get-away?