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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Airport fiction.

The Return Of Rothkoid

00:34 / 24.08.05

I'm going through a bit of a stage. I find that I need some kind of easy reading after I've chunked through something dense, in order to give the old brain a rest. And so, I've been checking out the local Vinnies and stocking up on airport tomes. You know the ones: particularly unsubtle covers (often involving a gauntlet, burning flag or money) with author name (Ludlum, Follett et al) in type larger than the title.

And bugger me, my snobbery has failed me. Some are bloody good, in a very archaic kind of way. Written in my lifetime, a lot of them, though they've now got the sort of tinge to them that the Fu-Manchu stories do when I read them. Just out of reach - that kind of thing.

Anyway, what I was wondering was what people think about airport books. Fuck knows I couldn't get through A Glastonbury Romance very successfully on a long plane ride - but I powered through a couple of Martin Cruz Smith's Russian novels - Gorky Park and Polar Star - in no time. Compulsive, they be.

So what's your thoughts? And, more importantly, where does one start with Robert Ludlum, if at all?

05:55 / 24.08.05

I fucking hate the monopoly airport fiction enjoys in, well, airports. These days most bookshops have become enlightened enough to have developed their own graphic novel section. Graphic novels and manga are currently the fastest growing catagory of fiction and yet they are conspiciously absent from our airports.

The Return Of Rothkoid

08:35 / 24.08.05

Probably because of shelf-space issues. You can pack a lot more copies of The Bourne Identity onto shelves than you can TPBs.

The question also remains: how many business classers are gonna be seen with Transmetropolitan rather than a copy of the Fin Review, or one of those ubiquitous Dan Brown tomes?

So, aside from your hatred of the genre's monopoly of airports, what do you think of the people who've become part of the departure-lounge canon?

09:51 / 24.08.05

Robert G. Barrett's Ken Norton books are the ultimate travel reading- violent, bloody, humourous and oversexed travelogues themselves, and as addictive as chocolate-flavoured sugar-coated crack cocaine.

16:55 / 24.08.05

Kevin Sampson's "Powder". By any ordinary literary means, it's a steamer, like "young person's guide to becoming a rockstar" (remember that?) devoid of any intellectual capacity-and let's be honest, there wasn't much there to begin with.

Still, kept this picky young man happy on my last foreign stint.

Haus of Mystery

11:39 / 26.08.05

Some authors I like a lot often fall into the 'airport' novel category - Armistead Maupin, and Douglas Coupland off the top of my head, alongside obvious guiltier pleasures like (early) Stephen King. William Gibson? He enjoys immense 'holiday' popularity. Brett Easton Ellis is available in most travel bookshops. And so on, and so on. Iain Banks. Iain M Banks. Page turners one and all. Is that not the key to their popularity as 'holiday' reads?

ONLY NICE THINGS

13:35 / 26.08.05

Cavalier and Clay? That's almost exactly the right length to last you a flight to Boston, if you also watch "New York Minute" with the Olsens.

Goodness Gracious Meme

13:51 / 26.08.05

Powder! My god, yes, it's perfect long-haul reading, sliding gently over your brain and never agitating it.

On a slightly better but similar note, I once described Douglas Rushkoff's The Ecastasy Club as the Barbelith Airport Novel.

I was being disparaging but was later convinced that this is a thing of joy!

Hmm, this kind of thread always makes me wonder how these categories actually function. Is someone 'Airport Novel' if it appears in all Airport Bookshops? Or is there a genre connotation? And how does this tie into the democratisation of reading?

Also on this tip, there are always lots of romance novels, has anyone got tips on this area.

I regard Jackie Susaan as being wonderful stuff and perfect Airport reading. (I imagine that Valley of the Dolls et al would have been in those bookshops in the 70s)

16:14 / 26.08.05

Silly novels set in offices make the best airport fiction for me, and Matt Beaumont's E and Ted Heller's Slab Rat are particularly fine examples of the genre. They're both over quite quickly, though, so their disadvantage over thrillers is that you need to take more than one on the plane.

sliding gently over your brain and never agitating it.

...which is, I think, the perfect definition of airport fiction. Any book which is absorbing enough to keep you reading it, whilst simultaneously not requiring so much thought you ever have to stop reading it is exactly what's required to distract you from the ever-present possibility of plummeting to the ground in an orgy of fire and twisted metal. That's all I want from airport (aeroplane, by that point) fiction, anyway...

11:41 / 03.09.05

Sorry, but any book with the raised gold lettering of the authors name in front of a bleeding rose and a gun makes my flesh crawl. Cover snob that I am.
'Jack Bigcock strode toward the President with a grim expression on his chiselled face. His particular expertise was needed again to save the free world from another power crazed foreign conspiracy, a dirty job but someone had to do it, and he was that man. "Jack! Thank God you're here!" the president fawned..'
Yuk.

02:26 / 04.09.05

Well, come on, Quantum, keep fucking going, I was just getting into that.

15:57 / 04.09.05

-Greet President.
-Rub stubble.
-Check contents of pockets.

16:39 / 04.09.05

-Ask President if he likes Girls Aloud.