While sitting sandwiched between strangers on a flight to my hometown last week, I couldn’t help but marvel at my ridiculousness. I’m a book review editor who hates to read books on planes. Long flights, short flights–it doesn’t matter. So anxious am I to arrive at my destination that I can’t involve myself in a good novel or work of nonfiction. Air travel and that kind of concentration seem incongruous, even dangerous. Why would I want to plunge into another world, only to be torn out of it by a rather surly stewardess’ voice and suffer whiplash? I like to dictate the length of my sittings, thank you very much.

My only refuge is in magazines. Give me a Vogue, an Allure, and a GQ, and I’m suitably happy–until I look down the aisle to spy an eight-year-old reading a five-hundred-pound Harry Potter installment. Or better yet, a 90-year-old woman reading the same book. “Something must be wrong with me,” I thought after I made my connection at Minneapolis. I was, I decided during my descent into Bismarck, ND, a kind of pervert (magazines being the equivalent of a motel with hourly rates). Apparently, I like to “check in” and “check out” of a narrative cheaply, lest it encroach on the thrill of my homecoming. That emotion takes precedence over anything a book would conjure. And if it made me slimy, I’d just have to deal with it. I’ve never pretended to be a “normal” reader.

Once I’m where I need to be, however, the story changes. I’m in the right frame of mind for reading. On my sister’s bookshelf one sweltering afternoon, I came across a hardback of Ann Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, complete with gold-foil dust jacket. A quick glance at the copyright page told me it was a first edition (!!), a feature that my sister had failed to notice when she bought it for 25 cents at a garage sale. Just then, I felt the old jolt–I had chemistry with this book–but family called, and you can’t shut family out, as the man reading Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections on my return flight would’ve told me.