Flying (two segments) from Kentucky back to Boston, I rampaged through Eurasia with help from Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. But, just in case my diet of mare’s milk went sour, my backpack contained a back-up paperback mystery. (Say that three times, fast!)
Even on long flights with many, many movies, a good book is more absorbing for longer times.
I remember one rocky flight from Chile, with a jolting emergency stop in Ecuador because one of the passengers had a health emergency, when I was completely absorbed by The Perpetual Orgy, a wonderful book of essays about Flaubert that I could have included in my blogpost about books with embarassing titles. (But that book was hardcover, an exception to my rule.)
Here’s a new challenge for Amazon’s API: create a mathematical formula that minimizes book weight and maximizes the number of 5-star reviews for two very different paperbacks. That’s a formula I’d use for picking my airplane-book-pairs.