The Art of Airplane Reading

I take a lot of transatlantic flights. I don't tend to sleep on planes and don't generally travel between continents with my laptop. These statements mean I must bring along the perfect airplane read. Airplane books are an art - they have to be as engaging as a good Vanity Fair article, but not so page-turning that I get restless and bored. It needs to not require a great deal of brain power and not be written in stream-of-consciousness. It needs to contain either a great story, or some piece of knowledge that I'm not familiar with, or is funny. I often wander a bookstore prior to a trip looking for just the right book and it's often a difficult choice. But I think I may have found a good one for my flight to London in a couple of days - Pretty Little Dirty by Amanda Boyden.

Previous perfect airplane reads have been The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (maybe the best airplane read in history), Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaasen, Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, and A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews.

As an aside, A Complicated Kindness just won Canada Reads. Too bad - it should have been Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden.