Terry Prone: Dodge the duds and avoid book buyer’s remorse on long-haul trips
When you look at the tables of books in the airport shop, you need to know the hints that any particular book is a dud
Originally published by the Irish Examiner.
It doesn’t matter that much if you’re just flying to Birmingham or Amsterdam.
You’re not going to be stuck in the plane long enough to develop major buyer’s regret over whatever you selected in the bookshop.
A transatlantic flight, though, or one headed to Australia, can be terrible if you have picked a dud book.
It is like being at a wedding where you’re trapped with a distant relative whose commitment to being boring is matched only by their practiced skill at it.
Dud-avoidance, in the airport, is personal. If you’re one of those people who loves books about women in their early 20s who spend their days sculpting their faces in between WhatsApping what might be described as their thoughts, then your choice is simple, because so many of those books get published every year.
Open them and you find brand names. Not because the book is sponsored, although maybe it is, but because the heroine of such novels navigates their way through life guided by branding.
Like the way explorers used to follow the notches cut into trees by scouts going ahead of them, these women progress in little jumps, starting with Charlotte Tilbury or Tommy Hilfiger.
When you look at the tables of books in the airport shop, you need to know the hints that any particular book is a dud. Starting with the cover and the title.
If the cover has a rendition of a house at twilight with figures in silhouette in the windows, it’s a dud.
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