Goth Chick News: The Best Book to Not Read on a Plane
Until recently, reading on a plane was one of my personal joys.
As an electronics geek (admitting it is the first step) it is a rare thing indeed for me to find myself in an environment where connectivity isn’t possible. Okay, I know that some flights are now offering Internet in the sky, but I prefer to ignore this for the time being in the name of preserving the one place where I can guiltlessly escape email, IM and my cell phone. And though it is still possible to “work” while disconnected, I generally ignore this as well and relish the opportunity to sink uninterrupted into a novel.
And this was precisely what I did on a recent getaway to my favorite US destination; New Orleans. I boarded the American Airlines jet and settled back in my window seat with Chris Bohjalian’s fourteenth novel, The Night Strangers.
Things went all wrong shortly thereafter.
We had only just pushed back from the gate when the plane came to a rather abrupt halt and the engines shut down. The pilot’s voice sounded a tad embarrassed when he explained our aircraft had just experienced an “electrical abnormality” and mechanics were being called to look into the issue before we would be cleared to take off.
Now, as someone who has clocked countless hours on airplanes, this “electrical abnormality” didn’t concern me all that much. I imagined that some unexpected red light was blinking away in the flight deck that probably wouldn’t have meant much if it had occurred aloft, but as it had started up while we were still on the runway, the crew was obligated to halt our journey and have it looked at.
I went back to The Night Strangers.
In case you’re not familiar (I certainly wasn’t prior to picking up his latest book), Chris Bohjalian is a New York Times bestselling author, and his latest outing The Night Strangers is a ghost story inspired by both a door in his basement and Sully Sullenberger’s successful ditching of an Airbus in the Hudson River.
Nearly every night, I read aloud to my boys. For Evan, my seven-year-old, I have lately been reading The Hobbit. Two nights ago, no sooner had I begun than Evan interrupted, saying, “It’s funny how they spell ‘Smaug.’”
Hal Duncan’s The Book of All Hours is a dazzling, fascinating, frustrating work. A duology consisting of 2005’s Vellum and 2007’s Ink, it plays with structure and story in powerful ways, while also seeming to fall back too easily into black-and-white absolutes and traditional forms. The oddity of the book is that although in some ways it appears radically new, in other ways, as one reads further into it, it comes to feel more and more familiar.
If you read a lot, you’ll soon find yourself drawn to writers who become personal favourites but who, unaccountably, go unrecognised by the wider world. A little while ago my girlfriend introduced me to a book by one of her own favourite writers, a woman named Joan North. I want to write about North here, because I was impressed by her work and I think she deserves to be better known.
Young adult fiction has a lot going for it in recent years. In the wake of the Harry Potter craze, there’s an entire generation of young people who have grown up with the understanding that reading is a cool way to spend your time and entertain yourself.