Great reads for long flights

Tickets: tick. Passport: tick. Books to read while spending hours and hours in airports and planes: tick. Geography means New Zealanders are super-world-champs when it comes to international travel. A trip to Australia is a doddle, the mere length of a meal and an inflight movie. It's the hanging around at the airports that drags out the transtasman proceedings.

Flying to Oz may be a breeze, but it's on those 12-hour hauls to Asia, Europe and the United States when we need to plan carefully how to fill the time. Sure, movies and inflight games are all right if you can handle the small screens and tinny sound battling with the engine drone and the clinking of the drinks trolley. But a good book — not too heavy, not too lite — will help those hours fly by in the airport and the air.

Depending on your destination, it is best to buy a few books before takeoff. Don't rely on retail outlets at overseas airports — you'll either find very little in English or a poor selection anyway. The bookshop at Los Angeles international, for example, is the pits, whereas we are generally well-served at the major New Zealand terminals.

Unless you are one of those hyperactive people whose brains remain intellectually rigorous on flights, don't overtax yourself by tackling something like Stephen Hawkings' Short History of Time. That is just being too hard on yourself.

There are some books you'll enjoy so much you'll want to bring them back but ideally, read'n'leave is a handy system.

The pure trashy escapism of thrillers make them a top choice choice for flying. Speaking of which, can you believe Jeffrey Archer is back on the scene, with False Impressions (Macmillan, $34.99). It links a murder and the sleuthing of a young lady who goes "missing" after 9/11. But you'd have to be prepared to be seen carrying former felon Archer through immigration.

Brash American crime writer James Patterson is always reliable, and his latest, Mary, Mary (Headliner, $24.99), once again features hero FBI agent Alex Cross, desperately seeking a serial killer called Mary Smith who is knocking off Hollywood's A-list. Appropriate for those enroute to LA, perhaps ...

Michael Connelly is one American writer I have picked up at LA airport's bookshop. His latest, The Lincoln Lawyer (Orion, $36.99), does not feature his usual protagonist cop, Harry Bosch, but attorney Mickey Haller whose office is his car.

Haller and his lineup of no-hoper clients will keep you going until about halfway between LA and Auckland, by which time, if you're still compos, you can switch to the terrific Elmore Leonard and The Hot Kid (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, $34.99), set in Oklahoma in the 1930s and featuring young lawman Carl Webster.

For those Europe-bound — specifically and delectably Italy — you can't go past Donna Leon's Venetian Commissario Brunetti in his 13th thriller, Doctored Evidence (William Heinemann, $36.99), which takes the doughty detective along the murky path of murder and illegal immigration. Michael Dibdin's gloomy detective Aurelio Zen was also based in Venice, long ago, but his career and locales have zigzagged all over Italy of late. This time, he's Back to Bologna (Faber, $35), suffering from severe hypochondria and half-heartedly investigating the case of an industrialist stabbed with a Parmesan knife. It's very funny.

If crime is not your bag, but broad English humour is, you can't go past Jeremy Clarkson's duel publications The World According To ... and Clarkson On Cars (Penguin, both $28). The first is a collection of Clarkson's newspaper columns from the past couple of years, musings on a multitude of subjects from David Beckham to the joys of 1970s rock. The latter is self-explanatory and, depending on your fondness for the man, amusing and, occasionally, quite puerile.

While you're travelling at hundreds of kilometres an hour, spare a thought for Burt Munro and the fastest Indian in the world. You saw the movie, now read the book: One Good Run: The Legend of Burt Munro (Penguin, $34.99), which tells the tale of the Southland racer without the histrionics of Anthony Hopkins' acting.

And for those who prefer a rattling good fictional yarn, we recommend: the remarkable John Mortimer's latest Quite Honestly (Penguin, $49.99), about a naive young social worker cutting her do-gooder teeth on a lineup of lags from Wormwood Scrubs.

John Le Carre's The Constant Gardener (Coronet, $27.99), a new edition to go with the film, which should be screening inflight round about now. It's a Le Carre classic, about the west's political and economic exploitation of Africa, a tale of murder, pharmaceutical drugs and love. It is absolutely terrifying.

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury, $27.99), a remarkable account of two little boys in Kabul in 1975 told from the perspective of an older man looking back to the trauma of the Russian invasion and the rule of the Taleban. The first Afghan novel to be written in English, it is deeply absorbing, a handy attribute on a long flight.

Hilary Mantel's darkly humorous Beyond Black (Harper Perennial, $26) is about London medium Alison Hart who puts on a cheery face for her banal stage shows but is secretly plagued by nasty, disturbing visions.

If you missed out on one of the year's biggest hits, Q&A, by Vikas Swarup (Doubleday, $34.99), the adventures of remarkable waiter Ram Mohammed Thomas who wins the biggest gameshow on Indian television will keep you entertained and charmed for a few hours at least.

Hot off the presses, and only available at this stage in hardback is Nothing That Meets the Eye (Bloomsbury, $59.99), a collection of 28 stories by the high mistress of literary suspense, Patricia Highsmith.

She died 10 years ago, but her ability to get under the skin of the cool, calm and completely mad psychopath remains unparalleled. The stories range from 1938-1982, and by the time you've read your way from Mightiest Mornings all the way through to The Second Cigarette, you'll have journeyed thousands of kilometres without hardly noticing.