What to read?

Still in the waiting phase. I picked up some paying work on Friday which will help keep me busy over the next few weeks. End of the semester coming, so lots of paper grading too. I continue to be in a kind of reading funk, unable to concentrate on much.

I'm hoping I'll start to snap out of things after tomorrow night when I meet with one of my readers and get her feedback. That should start me thinking about the book a lot if I let it. I'll have to make a decision about how far ahead I can let myself get of my other reader who will be a few more weeks before getting back to me.

I won't be able to start any work on the next draft until next week anyway because I'm traveling later this week for three nights. I'm trying to decide what book/s to take with me. The airlines these days, of course, charge an extra $25 fee for every book you carry, so it's something I have to think carefully about.

It can't be so short that if there are three long flight delays instead of the usual two I end up finishing the book and have nothing to read. It can't be so long that I'm lugging around extra literature for no reason. It has to be something that I'm pretty confident that I'll want to finish once I get started. It can't require too much concentration, since I have to watch out for swine flu. And it has to make me look sexy. And fit in a 3 oz bottle or the TSA will take it away from me.

I was thinking maybe Anna Karenina in the new Oprah Winfrey translation, which arrived from Amazon the other day, but that's too long. I still haven't read any Michael Chabon, and I have a couple of his recent long novels in paperback. That one about the comic books. Will I enjoy that?