After talking about the best books to read on an airplane, let's take a look at the opposite: books to never read while you are involved in a bout of air travel.
1. The Hot Zone
Richard Preston
This fast-paced narrative about the rapid spread of a terrifying disease is all the more frightening for being a work of non-fiction. Preston may have "punched up" some aspects of ebola, and used excessively lurid descriptions of the damage the disease wreaks upon its victims, but all in the service of telling a cracking good story.
Not only does the ebola epidemic basically start on an airplane; airline travel remains one of our most significant vector for dangerous communicable diseases today.
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2. Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors
Piers Paul Read
I re-read this book a few years ago, and I can report that this 1974 book is just as fresh today as the day it was published. In October of 1972, an airplane carrying a Uruguayan soccer team and their friends and family crashed in the Andes. Out of 45 original passengers, over a third died in the initial crash. Only 16 were still alive when they were finally rescued over two months later. Trapped high in the barren Andes, they had no choice but to eat the remains of their fellow passengers in order to survive.
A fascinating and amazing tale of human spirit and the will to survive. And probably the worst possible thing you could read on a plane.
3. The Langoliers
Stephen King
This novella was published in the collection Four Past Midnight. Frankly, it's not one of his best. (It was written at the tail end of King's struggle with addiction, before he managed to turn the corner.) However, the worldbuilding is top notch. It really feels like you are trapped on a plane with a bunch of strangers while the world is dissolving around you. Will the plane run out of gas first, or be swallowed by the darkness?
I won't spoil the ending, but I will say that a horror story set on an airplane is a bad choice for travel reading.
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4. 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside The Twin Towers
Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn
This amazing and moving book details what happened in the 102 minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center tower. In those 102 minutes over 12,000 people would survive, while 2,749 would die. The narrative has been painstakingly stitched together through hundreds of interviews with survivors, news footage, previously-unreleased emergency call transcripts, and more.
This moving and engrossing book is as heartbreaking as it is unsuitable for air travel.
5. Outliers
Malcolm Gladwell
This interesting and entertaining popular science book is a great, quick, smart read. You might think it would be ideal for travel reading, but you would be wrong. Gladwell devotes an entire chapter to analysis of airplane crashes via black box recording. His analysis is fascinating and unexpected (the chapter itself is titled "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes") and utterly unsettling.
Definitely one of the last things you should read while you have your life in the hands of a complete stranger at 30,000 feet.
6. Sole Survivor
Dean Koontz
Ordinarily a Dean Koontz novel might make for pretty good airplane reading. Koontz's novels may not be High Art, but they move at a fast pace, and they keep you hooked. However, the key event in this novel is an airplane crash with no survivors reported, in which a Los Angeles Post crime reporter loses both his wife and his daughter. A year later, while still grappling with his overwhelming grief, a woman approaches him claiming to have survived the crash.
Sole Survivor is a fast-paced, rollicking read, but this is not the kind of terror you need to wade through while you are sitting on an airplane.
7. Survivor
Chuck Palahniuk
The main story is the tale of a man named Tender Branson, the last survivor of a mysterious, Heaven's Gate-style suicide cult. The novel's framing device is that Branson is telling his story to the black box of a 747 airplane which he is piloting solo, having hijacked it and released all of the passengers and crew. When he has finished telling his story, he intends to commit suicide by crashing the plane.
Palahniuk's books are universally fascinating, revolting, and without compare. But if you're on a plane, skip this desolate tale of suicide and aviation hijinks.
Image courtesy Flickr/epSos.de
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