SOMEWHERE over the Mississippi River I looked up from my book, glanced out the window, realized that my flight out of New York was actually in the air, that we seemed to be making good time, and that there was a slim chance I would make a tight connection in Texas and get to my first meeting in New Mexico. Duly noted. I glanced at the snaking river below me, took in the squared-off landscape, and plowed right back into my book.
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. Im just beginning to mainline the addictive Ruth Rendell.
This breakthrough came after years of piling up back issues of sobering magazines, hoarding clips on topics like The Trouble in Galicia or Economic Peril Sets In to read on the plane. After years of buying paperbacks of world classics, meaning to reacquaint myself with the stuff of college classes. After years of being tethered to my middle seat too near the lav, struggling distractedly through great prose, tough reporting, clear-minded thinking, biting analysis — and understanding nothing.
Instead of reading, I used to worry about how long a delay was going to last; fret over the awfulness of the dried-out sandwich that was meant to be dinner; gently shove back the head of a slumped stranger snoring on my shoulder; feel a miasma of germs settle around my head and travel up my nose, down my throat, into my eyes; imagine the incipient thrombosis that would clog my heart, just because I was too timid to ask two grumpy people to get up once again so I could walk down the aisle.
And then I finally found the literature that stands up to the tests of travel. The secret, dear reader, lies in narrative drive. Plain, old-fashioned, unrelenting, compelling storytelling. Youve got to reach for the best-seller shelves. Which, until now, I had avoided with the mild disdain of the librarian who finds herself stamping withdrawal slips for the football team.
It all started one day when I was in a swivet over a canceled flight out of St. Louis. I had gotten to the bottom of a daunting pile of clips. One of my biggest nightmares loomed: nothing to read. At the newsstand was a stack of novels by a writer whose name dimly rang a bell, something from television land, perhaps? Worse. Video games. Having been a Tolkien addict as a teenager — and there, on the cover, it said, our American Tolkien — and feeling weary, weak, awfully alienated from those teenage years and far from the comforts of home, I reached for A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin.
Within minutes, I was a goner. As dismal hours in the airport lounge slipped by, my mind stayed locked in the conveyor belt of a fantasy saga. Nothing mattered but world dominion. I left the tawdry, dingy, gray world of airlines and moved into a place of large, complicated, colorful conquest. When I glanced at my fellow passengers, I no longer saw the poor slobs who were as sick and tired as I was. I saw the Brotherhood of the Wall, imperturbably guarding a towering barrier of ice and magic. That wasnt a manic Chihuahua yapping in a crate. It was a direwolf pup, with whom I felt a mystical kinship. Before long, I, too, was a queen, bedraggled by a long journey, surely, but with my warlord, a nomadic Dothraki, at my side. My carry-on carried dragon eggs, not two-ounce bottles of liquids.
Dont get me wrong. I love Daniel Deronda and Martin Chuzzlewit as wholeheartedly as the next English major. But the last time I tried reading Ulysses, as the plane was being de-iced and delayed for more than an hour, I felt as if my brain had entered the literary equivalent of a wait on the tarmac. Joyce was going nowhere, fast — and so was I.
I no longer take Great Literature on the road. It belongs nestled in my arms, deep in a comfortable chair by a crackling fire, where I can tend lovingly to every detail it whispers, where I can pay close attention to the dexterous play of intelligence and the lilting nuance of verbal agility.
Of course, one can stoop too low. Junk food may be what is needed on a plane trip, but junk books dont satisfy. Poor writing grates on my ear, no matter where I am. It is like eating too many potato chips; by the time you realize your tongue is glued to a salt lick, you feel dumb as a cow, and youre sick. What I want on a plane trip is a loud, beefy — even vulgar — but scintillating companion. Someone like Scott Turow, who commands attention but is refined enough to respect my intelligence. This, not unlike any level of discrimination in matchmaking, narrows the field.
By the end of an autumn of endlessly unpleasant plane flights, crisscrossing the country for a book tour, I had traveled through all five volumes of Mr. Martins epic series, A Song of Ice and Fire. I went into immediate withdrawal, and just as quickly came out when I discovered P. D. James, a brilliant writer who studs her mysteries with vitamin-fortified words like rumbustious. The hours speed by, even when the miles do not. What is a cranky ticket agent compared with a headless body? When was the last time you thought the plane was landing too soon? Trust me: that happens when you have 30 more pages of Shroud for a Nightingale.
You cannot have a steady diet of crime when you are in airports because after a while you get a creepy feeling that you are surrounded by murderers and remittance men, if not actually sitting next to one. So, when the mayhem of detective novels became a bit heavy, I dipped into the anodyne Irish novelist Maeve Binchy. She held up for thousands of miles; I flew through the tribulations of the women who populate the fictitious town of Knockglen in rural Ireland in the 50s: Circle of Friends, The Copper Beech, Minding Frankie. I loved them all. The characters are sweetly troubled but the village is always there to prop them up. This is comforting. It also explains the siren call of the dark psychological thrillers of Ruth Rendell.
I like to cover great blocks of books: all the Martins, all the Cornwells, all the Jameses. It is time for a new writer when I find myself rereading the same book a third time — and I dont even realize it until about halfway through, when the story becomes a tad too predictable. Theres something about airplane air that destroys memory cells. The covers, the plot lines, the characters begin to blur. All the stories sound familiar. Thats part of their appeal. They will get you where you want to go, unlike the diverted plane in which you are sitting.
Dont make the mistake of straying off the plot path. You need books with hefty runways and fast takeoffs. You might be tempted, say, to go with autobiographies by Patti Smith or Keith Richards. Noisy, yes; they do drown out the chop of propellers. But famous lives often splutter and short out early, and, Ive noticed, this generally happens right around the time a gate change is announced.
Dont even think of tackling titles like The Power of Kindness or Happiness: A Guide to Developing Lifes Most Important Skill. You will have failed to develop your better self the moment you are afflicted by the power of unkind strangers bearing Elite Status Membership, shoving you aside in their skilled race to a new boarding gate. Im all for compassion, but its not what you want to practice when youre stranded in Cincinnati.
All I want now, from a good airplane book, is transport. A sense of propulsion. I want to feel the rush of plot against my cheek. I want to know where I am going, and why. Im willing to trade transport for transportation.
I want all the things, in other words, that the airlines no longer deliver. But who cares? When the world around you is ringing with clashing swords, cataclysmic love affairs, swashbuckling detectives — when you are moving at warp speed through entertaining realms — the right book becomes your ticket to travel, and your plane ticket only feeds the fantasy that you are making progress through this world.
DOMINIQUE BROWNING, author of the memoir Slow Love, is the senior director of Moms Clean Air Force, an organization fighting air pollution as a childrens health issue.
