Semi-Dorky Poll: Airplane Books

I’m off to the 38th annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society this week, which will be in Calgary, Alberta. Another province on the list of North American place I’ve visited…

I’m taking the tablet PC with me, so there may be some conferecne blogging, but I can’t guarantee it. I’m going to schedule some book-related items, though, so there’ll be some posts on the site even when I’m in Canada, and we’ll start with this:

What do you tend to read on airplanes?

I’ve got a mental category that I think of as “airplane books”– they tend to be trashy genre fiction, and the sort of thing that’s diverting enough to keep me from worrying about whether the plane will go down, but not so engrossing that if the plane did go down, my ghost would stalk the Earth trying to find out how the story ends. I’ve heard other people argue that an airplane is the dieal place for reading complicated mainstream literary fiction, because you don’t have any other option than to concentrate on the book.

Anyway, for this trip, I have Walter Mosely’s Fearless Jones, Dave Duncan’s Children of Chaos, and the Hugo nominees in the short fiction categories are loaded onto my Palm. That ought to keep me sane in the air.

What’s your airplane reading?