I either play with my laptop or sleep. The plane is the one place where I wish I had a tablet since the form factor of a laptop is slightly too big to be comfortable on a plane and a smartphone is too small to be enjoyable. I do enjoy the planes that have touchscreen entertainment on the seats as long as it has games and not just tv.
The days when we could comfortable use laptops on planes is still a fond memory. I used to enjoy American because they bragged about increased seat pitch, for our comfort. I guess I’m the only dummy that cared enough to pay for American versus Fly-by-Night companies.
Never bought a novel, but did pick up “Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time” and it kept me interested from Atlanta to LA a number of years ago. Last books I bought were in Sydney, Australia, awaiting a flight to Dallas (LONG Flight), and got a couple compilations of Jeremy Clarkson columns. He’s a bit of a twat, as the British would say, but he’s easy reading for 16 hours in the air.
But usually I pack my own reading material with me.
I read a ton of books, it kills me not to finish one. I was traveling light so needed to buy one in Dublin for the flight to NY, the DaVinci code just came out in paperback.
I threw it out waiting in baggage claim. I don’t care how it ended.
Some years ago, when I was delayed in Calgary, I bought a John Grisham novel. I don’t know why, but Grisham seems to be my “go-to” when I’m stuck in an airport.
actually I never bought a book at lax…there used to be a book exchange rack where you could get a free used book with the hope you would drop the book off at the exchange rack at your destination… funny thing is people would write " jt was here DAL to LAX '99 on the covers … some of those books had been to hell and back …
at some point they had so many donations they had a donation box…
Airframe by Michael Crichton. Flying from NJ to Seattle. It’s about the investigation of an airliner incident. I remember a flight attendant seeing it and saying, “Good, isn’t it?” I agreed though reading while flying seemed to make it a more visceral experience than it otherwise would have been.
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1am flight out of Hyderabad heading for Kuala Lumpur and then onto Sydney. I picked up a copy of *The Alienist *by Caleb Carr. It was good enough I went and found the sequel
*The Angel of Darkness when I got home.
*
Grisham wrote the only airport novel I ever bought: Playing For Pizza. Even though I detest football, and have been programmed to think of Grisham as a formulaic hack, I enjoyed it quite a bit.
Too bad. If I have to bear the suffering, so do you.
Tom Hanks survives to star in the prequel, Angels and Demons.
I can’t remember the specific last book, but I do remember the first - The Firm, by Grisham. In my mind, he’s the archetype for this.
Last book was “A Geek In Japan”. Never bought an airport novel.
I usually travel with tablet, kindle and laptop, but on my last trip to Barcelona I hit a long enough travel delay that my battery life was in serious doubt. I bought some YA fantasy novel that I thought my daughter would like (she did - Court of Thorn and Roses series maybe), and something else which I have completely forgotten. I can almost always find a way to charge up, so I don’t need a hard copy, but that trip I did.
Room. I didn’t know anything about it and was sucked in.
Before that it was The Devil in the White City and I still haven’t finished it!
I think the only time I ever did was in the late 1970s for a novelization of “Star Wars”. Nowadays I bring my diary so I will have something exciting to read. Alright, I stole the last bit from Oscar Wilde.
Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit. New York airports have “classics” sections.
Something by Carl Hiaasen