Next weekend will mark the start of Vacation Season here at Chateau Steelypips. Or, rather, out of Chateau Steelypips, as we’ll be spending four of the next seven weeks in other places.
This, of course, will require books for me to read on the various airplane flights needed to reach our vacation destinations. And while the shelves here are positively groaning under the weight of unread books, I’m a little short on good Airplane Books, mostly because I tend to tear through those as fast as I get them. A quick pass through Borders yesterday didn’t produce much, either.
So I throw this open to the wisdom of crowds of blog readers:
Suggest some trashy genre fiction that I ought to buy to read on airplanes in August.
A bit more detail:
Examples of the sort of thing I’m thinking of:
- Books in the Jim Butcher “Dresden Files” vein. I’ve got the second Detective Inspector Chen book by Liz Williams sitting on the pile, which ought to work well, but I could use more of this kind of thing.
- Space opera books in the Scalzi/ Buckell sort of vein, though not necessarily to that level of quality. Something fast-paced with snappy dialogue and good scenery, and not too depressing. The next Virga book by Karl Schroeder would be perfect, but it doesn’t come out unitl late August.
- Space opera books in the Neal Asher/ Iain M. Banks kind of vein would also be good– something where humans and aliens rattle around the galaxy killing each other in inventively gruesome ways. Something for those moments when officious little airline people start to get on my nerves.
- Competence Fiction stories like Jack McDevitt’s “Antiquities Dealers in Spaaaace!” books, or Modesitt’s Recluce books (Modesitt is a standby for air travel, but I’m all caught up).
- Mystery/ detective novels in the hard-boiled sort of vein. I’ve got a Walter Mosley book in the pile (Fearless Jones), which is about right. G.M.Ford would also work, though Blown Away kind of annoyed me.
- Whatever genre it is that you would put Carl Hiaasen in.
Suggestions?