Here are 100 books that Airports, Cities, and the Jet Age fans have personally recommended if you like
Airports, Cities, and the Jet Age.
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I have always been fascinated with morally grey or complex characters. For me, the sign of a great novel is one where you find yourself talking about the characters as if they were real people you know. I want to experience something when I read, and characters that are flawed, imperfect, or morally grey have always intrigued me because they can take me to places I haven’t (or wouldn’t!) go myself. And, of course, they provide ample grounds for fun discussions with my friends! Sci-fi apocalyptic fiction is fertile ground for such characters, so I’ve tried to pick books you may not have heard of. I hope you like them!
This a beautifully lyrical book. The first chapter winds and twists through different scenes and places, like a gentle lake through a peaceful forest. Emily St John Mantel leads you through the past, present, and future so softly that it takes you a moment to realize the bleakness and horror of the post-pandemic world she’s describing.
I love a story told from multiple points of view, and this one is a masterclass. It weaves different events and characters so precisely that when everything comes to a head in the final chapters, it feels inevitable and natural. I also love a nuanced villain, and (without giving away who) this one is fantastic! I understood their motivation and logic, even as I desperately wanted them to lose.
'Best novel. The big one . . . stands above all the others' - George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones
Now an HBO Max original TV series
The New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction National Book Awards Finalist PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.
One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in…
I’ve long had an ambivalent relationship with airports. They have been the starting point for my adventures, but I have also known well the discomfort, boredom, stress, surveillance, bad food, and other unpleasantries that often define airport experiences. Despite my ambivalence, I’ve found airports to be fascinating places where differently situated people (travelers and workers) encounter one another. I’ve learned that those encounters, as well as airport operations and design, tell us something about the places where they are located and the broader societies in which we live. I’ve since become aware that reading (and writing) about airports are also great ways to gain such insights.
Airports are also highly charged, often controversial symbols of the places where they are located and of the condition of modern life more generally.
This book was one of the first books I read as I was beginning my own project. It helped me understand the complex meanings circulating around airports (in the United States and elsewhere) since the first ones were built in the early twentieth century. I also appreciated the irreverence and humor in the account, even when discussing rather grim subjects, and this helped to affirm my own ambivalent perspective on airports.
I’ve long had an ambivalent relationship with airports. They have been the starting point for my adventures, but I have also known well the discomfort, boredom, stress, surveillance, bad food, and other unpleasantries that often define airport experiences. Despite my ambivalence, I’ve found airports to be fascinating places where differently situated people (travelers and workers) encounter one another. I’ve learned that those encounters, as well as airport operations and design, tell us something about the places where they are located and the broader societies in which we live. I’ve since become aware that reading (and writing) about airports are also great ways to gain such insights.
Activism against racial discrimination in transportation was a key component of the African American Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Most stories about this activism focus on buses, street cars, trains, and the terminals and depots that served them.
This book valuably showed us, when it was published, how activism around airplanes and airports was an important part of this story. Doing so helped me better understand the role of racial justice struggles in the broader story of air travel’s democratization during the second half of the twentieth century.
Historical accounts of racial discrimination in transportation have focused until now on trains, buses, and streetcars and their respective depots, terminals, stops, and other public accommodations. It is essential to add airplanes and airports to this narrative, says Anke Ortlepp. Air travel stands at the center of the twentieth century's transportation revolution, and airports embodied the rapidly mobilizing, increasingly prosperous, and cosmopolitan character of the postwar United States. When segregationists inscribed local definitions of whiteness and blackness onto sites of interstate and even international transit, they not only brought the incongruities of racial separation into sharp relief but also obligated…
I’ve long had an ambivalent relationship with airports. They have been the starting point for my adventures, but I have also known well the discomfort, boredom, stress, surveillance, bad food, and other unpleasantries that often define airport experiences. Despite my ambivalence, I’ve found airports to be fascinating places where differently situated people (travelers and workers) encounter one another. I’ve learned that those encounters, as well as airport operations and design, tell us something about the places where they are located and the broader societies in which we live. I’ve since become aware that reading (and writing) about airports are also great ways to gain such insights.
This account of how LAX shaped its surrounding environment usefully affirmed my own decision to focus on a particular place. Its careful focus on how jet noise catalyzed relationships among a wide array of people and social forces in Los Angeles helped me understand better how such relationships had developed about 400 miles to the north.
Beyond all of that, this book has a lot of smart things to say about how noise more generally shapes our urban environments and attunes us to them.
In Atmospheric Noise, Marina Peterson traces entanglements of environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter that cohere in and through encounters with airport noise since the 1960s. Exploring spaces shaped by noise around Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), she shows how noise is a way of attuning toward the atmospheric: through noise we learn to listen to the sky and imagine the permeability of bodies and matter, sensing and conceiving that which is diffuse, indefinite, vague, and unformed. In her account, the "atmospheric" encompasses the physicality of the ephemeral, dynamic assemblages of matter as well as a logic of indeterminacy. It…
As a child I was a reluctant reader. For Christmas, I was given A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, which didn’t interest me at all (sorry!). So off we popped to WH Smiths to choose one book. I chose Roald Dahl’s The BFG. I was hooked. Roald Dahl’s way of writing enthralled me, and made me laugh. I felt like Dahl was a friend of my age, not an adult, and a very funny one at that! I’ve always been drawn to that kind of zany humour, such as TV shows like Dangermouse to The Simpsons then British comedies such as Blackadder. Laughter is good for the soul and I’m passionately laughing about it.
A children’s book that adults can enjoy too. And, I have to say, the humour is right up my cabbage patch. If you don't find this funny then your funny bone needs looking at. It's like a series of comedy sketches with the overall arc of memories of a child's holiday, of course, seen through the innocent eyes of a rather (perhaps dry-witted) child. We're taken through different pivotal memories of the holiday when hilarious moments took place, for example, dad's parking at the airport, and the episode with diarrhea. The funniest, laugh-out-loud moment came towards the end at airport security - I shan't give it away. It resonates with me and probably most people when reminiscing of their own childhoods, and for kids currently going through their own best holidays ever.
This unique book for six to eight year olds, tells two stories at the same time. The boy describes his best holiday ever but the illustrations reveal a series of hilarious disasters. Enjoy how children and parents sometimes see things differently.
Growing up as a kid, I was obsessed with R.L. Stine’s Goosebumpsbooks, most of which took place in small-town settings. Horror could hide anywhere in those towns, whether out in the woods or on the shelf at the local general store. I loved those books to death because they taught me (or perhaps reminded me) that darkness existed within daily life. As I grew older, my passion for the subgenre led me to consume more stories and eventually write my own.
This Stoker Award-winner nearly caused me to miss a connecting flight to Los Angeles. I started reading it in an airport restaurant and got completely swept away until the final boarding call. In Covenant, a big-city journalist visits a small Midwest town to investigate a series of mysterious suicides. What unfolds is a gripping supernatural tale filled with mysterious characters, riveting conflict, and unthinkable twists.
In a small town with a strange history of teen suicides, a group of five women have made a pact with a demon and must sacrifice their firstborn.
To the residents of the sleepy coastal town of Terrel, the cliffs of Terrel's Peak are a deadly place, an evil place where terrible things happen. Like a series of mysterious teen suicides over the years, all on the same date. Or other deaths, usually reported as accidents. Could it be a coincidence? Or is there more to it? Reporter Joe Kieran is determined to find the truth.
I started writing sweet romance during the COVID pandemic. At the time, it was the perfect antidote to all of the heaviness, grief, and sadness that everyone was experiencing around the world. When I began publishing my stories, and eventually moved into the sweet romcom genre, I was beyond happy to learn that my books were bringing smiles to peoples’ faces during these challenging times. I’ve always loved romcom movies, and discovering romcom books–not to mention beginning to write these stories myself–opened an entirely new world of possibilities. I pretty much only read romcoms now, and I hope you enjoy the books I’ve recommended here as much as I have!
This book sucked me in from the start, as do all of Katie Bailey’s books.
Liam and Annie are such an opposites attract couple, with the perfect amount of grumpy/sunshine chemistry… not to mention the exciting boss/employee trope. This story actually inspired the second book in my own romcom series, which ended up featuring the grumpy/sunshine trope.
Katie does an amazing job weaving heavier subjects with humor, and it put such a positive spin on my day whenever I picked it up. I love reading low spice romcom or chick lit stories with a heart, and this checked all those boxes for me!
Call me a worrier, but I’ve always viewed the world as a place fraught with danger, especially for the very young. Hidden sinkholes, falling tree branches, kidnappers lurking on street corners—there’s no threat I haven’t imagined. (Full disclosure: I’m a mom.) As a fiction author, I like to put my young characters in harm’s way and then deliver them to safety, an approach that helps me deal with my anxieties by giving me a sense of control. If I had my way, all imperiled-child stories, whether real-life or fiction, would end with a happily ever after. Alas, not all of them do.
Three families on a cruise go ashore in Central America. Then the unthinkable happens: their children vanish. Thankfully, I’ve never experienced that particular nightmare, but years ago my four-year-old son went AWOL for about five minutes while we were at the airport. I was a quivering blob of panic until kiddo turned up safe and sound. Of course, for the parents in this story, the terror stretches on for much longer than five minutes—and, believe me, you wouldn’t want it any other way. The unrelenting tension is just one of the elements that make this novel such a compelling read.
When Liv and Nora decide to take their husbands and children on a holiday cruise, everyone is thrilled. The ship's comforts and possibilities seem infinite. But when they all go ashore in beautiful Central America, a series of minor mishaps lead the families further from the ship's safety.
One minute the children are there, and the next they're gone.
What follows is a heart-racing story told from the perspectives of the adults and the children, as the distraught parents - now turning on one another and blaming themselves - try to recover their children and their shattered lives.
I enjoy finding science in places where you might not expect it. Science really is everywhere. It's tempting to think of it as its own category of news or its own shelf in the bookstore. But science is a way of thinking about every aspect of the world, including our passions and daily lives. I love finding the spaces where these lines are blurred, and these books are such great examples of finding science in surprising places.
All scientists are different, and this book brings that home in a very fun way. It's on the shelf with art coffee table books in my house because that's essentially what it is. The book collects photos of science tattoos and descriptions of the science behind the tattoos.
Some are small, simple line drawings of molecules; others are colorful sleeves or back tattoos with intricate scenes of plants, animals, or famous textbook images. As a science writer, I meet a lot of scientists and people who love (and live) science, and this book has had me keeping an eye out for DNA molecules and other science tattoos.
In this book, each tattoo is accompanied by a reflection on the science in question by bestselling essayist and lecturer Zimmer. Body art meets popular science in this elegant, mind-blowing collection, written by renowned science writer Carl Zimmer. Showcasing hundreds of eye-catching tattoos that pay tribute to various scientific disciplines, from evolutionary biology and neuroscience to mathematics and astrophysics, Science Ink reveals the stories of the individuals who chose to inscribe their obsessions in their skin. Best of all, each tattoo provides a leaping-off point for bestselling essayist and lecturer Zimmer to reflect on the science in question, whether it's…
Imagine World War II—with frequent chemical warfare attacks on cities and battlefields. Before and during World War II, laypeople and leaders held the widespread conviction that poison gas would be used in the next big war more destructively than in World War I. Churchill considered using gas if Germany invaded Britain. Roosevelt promised retaliation if the Axis used gas. Canada tested gas in Alberta’s fields. Fear and preparation for gas attacks permeated multiple countries, from laypeople to the top, from civilians to the military, but few talk about it. This is a hidden story of World War II, but one worth knowing. Just the threat of gas influenced the conflict.
What an eye-opening biography! Mary Sears never left the United States, but she was a key reason the World War II Pacific invasions were successful. This book does not take away from the sacrifices of the fighters or the hard strategic decisions and leadership of the commanders. It does show what science, combined with traditional fieldwork and creative library research, can do to design maps and provide information about tides, ocean depths, and coral reefs, thus enabling men, ships, and equipment to attack Japanese-held islands effectively.
This book is also an homage to teamwork by people, especially women and academics in the 1940s, who didn’t always receive a lot of respect from the military at the start of the war yet found themselves relied upon repeatedly for their top-secret work.
"Magnificently researched, brilliantly written, Lethal Tides is immensely entertaining and reads like an action novel. Catherine Musemeche has brought to life the incredible work of the scientists and researchers who made such a remarkable contribution to America's war effort in the Pacific theater during WWII." -Admiral William H. McRaven (U.S. Navy, Ret.), #1 New York Times bestselling author of Make Your Bed and The Hero Code
Lethal Tides tells the story of the virtually unknown Mary Sears, "the first oceanographer of the Navy," whose groundbreaking oceanographic research led the U.S. to victory in the Pacific theater during World War II.…
