Some things make little sense. 

Like what I read and where and when I do it.

Plagued by self-consciousness, I find that a Kindle aids me in this regard. I can read with an air of mystery. Nobody knows what I’m reading (imagine, for a second, that they might care).

On Saturday morning my burgundy-encased Kindle provided cover for my reading of a new thriller by T.J. Newman called Falling. In this case, I was grateful that nobody nearby knew I had my head buried in a book about perils in the air. If they knew, they might have given me a wider-than-six-feet radius. I was, after all, sitting in an airport, waiting by the gate for a flight—you know, clambering into a heavier-than-air container that would somehow take me to Boston.

One of the big promoters of the new book is author Don Winslow. I like his fast-paced writing. Among other things, he blurbed this about Falling: 

“This is Jaws at 35,000 feet.”

Evidently, that did not bother me. After all, my 40-minute Cape Air flight was probably not taking me any higher than 5,000 feet. Not the same thing. Right?

My serenity about it hit an air pocket when I read the first sentence: “When the shoe dropped into her lap the foot was still in it.” Uh, I thought, maybe wait until later in the day.

Amazingly, as the loudspeaker announced boarding for another flight, I read the second sentence: “She flung it into the air with a shriek.”

Fully engaged, I plunged into it. I kept reading. During the one-hour delay for takeoff. During the flight. During the Uber ride.

The New York Times reviewer had a different approach. She did not read it on a plane. She did not read it at an airport. In her review published/digitized on July 7, Tina Jordan wrote, “When I finished, all I could think was, I’m so glad I didn’t read this before I got on my first post-lockdown flight last month.”