Last week I discovered the perfect airline travel book: Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother. An airline travel book must be engaging enough to distract me from the rigors of airline travel but not too taxing on the little grey cells, and it should not include disasters involving flight or travel or anything else too emotionally demanding. Let's face it: modern airline travel is demanding enough. The book should provide an escape from misery, not an immersion in it.
Anything by P.G. Wodehouse or Douglas Adams makes a good airline travel book, and I once read Julian Barnes's England, England while flying to England, which worked really well. A Spot of Bother is Haddon's second novel; I think I also read the first while traveling (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time). A Spot of Bother has a plot similar to that of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, but Haddon's book is a better traveling companion because (1) it's shorter; (2) it's funnier; and (3) it features characters you'd actually like to spend time with.
Haddon got me through my long day of flying and waiting to fly home from Texas last week, but the great thing about reading a book in terminals and airplanes is that the travel experience tends to erase everything I read from my brain within nanoseconds after I've read it. That means I'll be able to enjoy Haddon's book again--this time while sitting still.
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