I really enjoy airports.
All the different people. All of the emotions. The magnificence of flight that this science fiction geek loves. About the only thing I don’t like is being “randomly selected” to be subjected to additional wand searches every time I go through airport security.
Being bald and sinister-looking like China Mieville has its perks, but not at today’s airports!
Last Friday I flew to Las Vegas to watch my brother over the weekend play in the Masters Pool Tournament. Pool is his passion, like sci-fi/fantasy is my passion, and I try to support him as much as I can. It was a fun trip. But as my airplane throttled up on the runway to return to Seattle it was shut down suddenly and upon returning to the terminal we learned the air conditioning system had malfunctioned.
Not good, right?
That isn’t the half of it. We had to wait an additional six hours before another plane arrived to fly us back to Seattle. That is a lot of time, time I used to edit more on my book and walk around the airport. After using an $8.00 meal voucher given me by the airline—which didn’t cover the lowest priced meal in the terminal, of course—I entered Hudson News, an airport store specializing in reading materials for travelers, to discover what kind of sci-fi/fantasy titles airport goers might be buying right now.
Here is what I found:
- Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
- Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
- Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
- Dead & Gone by Charlaine Harris
- Odd Hours by Dean Koontz
- Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
- Terminator Salvation by Alan Dean Foster
- Spook Country by William Gibson
- Small Favor by Jim Butcher
- From Dead To Worse by Charlaine Harris
- Wrath of a Mad God by Raymond E. Feist
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
These books contributed to about 17% of the books within that particular Hudson News outlet. I was not surprised to see the Twilight novels; after all, Stephenie Meyer was responsible for every seventh or eighth book sold last year. Movie tie-in novels like Terminator Salvation, Angels & Demons and The Road all make sense too as publicity is ramping up for those movies. The rest are bestselling authors with wide readerships.
I bought The Road and gave it to my friend who was traveling with me. It is easily one of the best books I’ve read in the last several years and I highly recommend it to everyone—especially before Viggo Mortensen immortalizes the father in the story later this year when the movie is released.
I already had The City & the City by China Mieville with me so I didn’t need to buy anything at Hudson News. Thankfully it helped assuage the time spent waiting and waiting and waiting in the Las Vegas airport.
And now, back home, I can relax and finish reading it!
Do you like to read while traveling?
Apropos of nothing, I’m reminded of an essay I read years (might’ve been decades) ago by some genre writer (might’ve been Harlan Ellison,) asserting that an airport is the toughest place to sell a book. He had apparently met a jobber in charge of managing the book racks at some airport (might’ve been O’Hare.)
It would take the jobber a few hours to do the circuit, refilling all the book racks in all the shops in all the terminals. When he got back to the first one, he’d check which of the new books sold in the few hours it took to make the tour. Any title that sold no copies in that time, he’d mark to be removed altogether from all slots.
Which, if true, basically meant that a new book had only a window of a few hours if it was gonna sell at all at that airport.
Despite my failing memory that clouds the details (there are a lot of “might’ve”s above, aren’t there?) I always liked that story. Keeps you humble, don’t ya know…
I travel with audiobooks. For whatever reason, I have a terrible time allowing myself to sink into a book if I’m trying to read it while en route anywhere. Maybe it’s the motion, maybe it’s a feeling of being crowded, or maybe I’m just easily distracted, but for whatever reason I can’t do a traditional book in those settings.
So I usually download a few audiobooks and listen to them whenever I’m on the road, in the air, or riding the rails. It’s pricier than picking up a mass market paperback, but I accept it as part of the cost of traveling comfortably and enjoy myself.
Last time I traveled it was Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell , and Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O’Nan. Currently Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan gets me to and from work on the subway.
Ali – What a story. If that’s true, it is quite a humbling notion. All the work that goes into those books behind the scenes and then it’s, “Ya got 3 hours kid, make ‘em count!”