Airplane Reading

High-Brow Lit for High Fliers?  Not Me.  (Print headline from The New York Times, 2/19/2012)

Excerpt: To what did I owe this newfound oblivion about where I was? This insouciance about fraying schedules? This good cheer about the dismaying ritual of herding, shuffling, squeezing, starving, sitting and suffocating that characterizes air travel today? 

To a good book. The right kind of good book. My heart and mind were plunged into an epic battle between good and evil, the struggle to establish a new world order, the heartbreak of love fractured by political imperative, the tragedy of families torn apart. 

Was I reading “War and Peace”? Hardly. I have given up flying with Great Literature. 

I must credit George R. R. Martin with a salutary breakthrough in my reading habits, but I might just as easily credit (or blame) Sara Paretsky, or Patricia Cornwell, or P. D. James, or Sue Grafton, or Faye Kellerman, or John Mortimer. I’m just beginning to mainline the addictive Ruth Rendell.