Fliers are Readers

Update: Chicago O'Hare International Airport. En Route to Seattle.
I left Iowa City this afternoon. Everything went well, I was working just a few blocks from the old capital building. I fly here from Des Moines. I am finding it difficult to keep a decent stock of ready reading material. I set out monday with two books, Bait and Switch (Barbara Ehrenreich), and Shakespeare's MacBeth. Bait and switch was finished before I made it to Denver on Monday, a scant 220 pages of large type. Lefty books are all large type since there must be a lot of glaucoma cases on the activist left, otherwise there wouldn't be such huge shortages of 'medicine' for them. It worked as what it was, a diary of a trip through the interview process for an unskilled white collar worker. It lacked the kinds of facts that I would hope for, like big bar graphs and pie charts!
Macbeth had even fewer pie charts, and I regretfully got an instructional edition, with facing pages full of notes and decryptions of obscure phrases. I find this disruptive, and am a fan of footnotes, or an appendix. I also found this combined with the annotation where the MS was unclear very frustrating. I wonder who the audience is for these books. Most likely, it is the spend the gift card you got in July before it expires crowd.
Here in O'hare, all the worldy amenities a seasoned traveller expects are available. There is a bookstore with more than the Oprah Reading list and the NYT bestsellers. (I read Anna Karenina before it was cool). They even have a starbucks every 75 feet. Compared to Denver Airport, it's just like Downtown, Maynard.

One other interesting tidbit. The Iowa Rest Area are WiFi Hotspots. I didn't connect to see if it was a restricted service, but that must keep truckers really happy on the long road from coast to coast across I80.

Dan