In-flight reading: Airport trash vs. War & Peace

So, your big trip is finally here. Yay! Your passport’s in order, you’ve managed to reduce your vital hand-luggage necessities to 100ml of liquid in a plastic bag, and your credit card’s topped up and ready to bolster a foreign economy - it’s lift-off time. Now you just have to endure that hellishly long flight to the other side of the world.

If, like many travellers, you can’t sleep on planes no matter how many pills you pop, you have a real issue. Who wants to touch down looking and feeling like an extra from Night of the Living Dead? Well, sorry - can’t help you there, but look on the bright side: this is your chance to catch up on all that long-overdue reading you never get time for in the hubbub of your daily existence. So ditch that predictable in-flight entertainment, keep your eyedrops close, and get booked!

Which raises the question: what’s your preferred reading matter on a long-haul flight? Do you like to study up on your phrasebook, or get under your destination’s skin with a novel that’s set there? Does light-weight, easy-to-read fluff make the hours fly faster than a dense literary masterpiece? And do people really read those airport blockbusters?

My scientifically unproven theory is that the compressed cabin atmosphere and enforced upright position make it difficult to concentrate on anything too challenging. A brief survey among friends and colleagues seems to back this up, revealing long-haul reading choices ranging from celebrity biographies to police procedurals, Marie Claire magazine to, ahem, The Toyboy Diaries.

Not a War & Peace in sight.