One thing about airplane travel, at least for YHB, is how necessary it is to have the right book. Not a great book. A competent book, that’s important. A book that’s too annoying would make the ride less pleasant, so that lets out many of the books I like (as I often like pretentious (or, to put it kindly, ambitious) books even when the ultimately fail to meet their pretensions (or ambitions). A book that provokes too much thought isn’t good either, as the gazing out the window reverie reminds me that I’m on an airplane. Plus, nobody wants me to be nudging the person next to me saying ‘listen to this’ all the time. On that thought, nothing so funny as to draw attention to my cachinnation. Plus, of course, there’s the weight issue: I can only carry so many books, so I want to be pretty confident I’ve got the right ones. So, what I want in my carry-on is a book I can be confident will be readable, absorbing even, but not too challenging or funny. Oh, and that won’t grieve me too much if I lose it before returning home.
So, I picked up an Arthur C. Clarke novel. OK, not the best move. His bad stuff is unreadable, and his good stuff is dense and provocative. I got lucky, though, because Songs of Distant Earth (New York: Del Rey 1987) was pretty much perfect airplane fare. The militant atheism (or at the very least virulent anticlericalism) would have been more annoying in a book I was taking more seriously from the beginning, and the characters were just rounded enough to be companionable without being really interesting. The world was alien but not too alien, the circumstances were exciting but not too exciting, the science was hard but not too hard, the jokes amusing but not too amusing. A professional book, if I can call it that.
Oh, and no, I’ve never heard the Mike Oldfield album evidently written as a soundtrack.
,
-Vardibidian.