Until recently, reading on a plane was one of my personal joys.
As an electronics geek (admitting it is the first step) it is a rare thing indeed for me to find myself in an environment where connectivity isn’t possible. Okay, I know that some flights are now offering Internet in the sky, but I prefer to ignore this for the time being in the name of preserving the one place where I can guiltlessly escape email, IM and my cell phone. And though it is still possible to “work” while disconnected, I generally ignore this as well and relish the opportunity to sink uninterrupted into a novel.
And this was precisely what I did on a recent getaway to my favorite US destination; New Orleans. I boarded the American Airlines jet and settled back in my window seat with Chris Bohjalian’s fourteenth novel, The Night Strangers.
Things went all wrong shortly thereafter.
We had only just pushed back from the gate when the plane came to a rather abrupt halt and the engines shut down. The pilot’s voice sounded a tad embarrassed when he explained our aircraft had just experienced an “electrical abnormality” and mechanics were being called to look into the issue before we would be cleared to take off.
Now, as someone who has clocked countless hours on airplanes, this “electrical abnormality” didn’t concern me all that much. I imagined that some unexpected red light was blinking away in the flight deck that probably wouldn’t have meant much if it had occurred aloft, but as it had started up while we were still on the runway, the crew was obligated to halt our journey and have it looked at.
I went back to The Night Strangers.
In case you’re not familiar (I certainly wasn’t prior to picking up his latest book), Chris Bohjalian is a New York Times bestselling author, and his latest outing The Night Strangers is a ghost story inspired by both a door in his basement and Sully Sullenberger’s successful ditching of an Airbus in the Hudson River.
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The interns are between semesters, the temperatures in Chicago are sub-zero and most important, the Boss is in Belize.
