The year 2021 was an odd one for me as a reader. Much of the reading I did was done in the service of some article I was writing. I’ve always wanted to write a long essay in praise of twentieth-century aviation fiction – i.e., novels written by the likes of Ernest K. Gann, Robert Serling, Neville Shute, and others who specialized in the fiction of flight – but I couldn’t figure out how to make it relevant enough for some publication to consider running it. But, early in 2021 I read The Skies Belong To Us, Brendan I. Koerner’s excellent nonfiction book from 2013 about the so-called “Golden Age of Skyjacking,” which stretched from 1965 to 1972. The book reminded me that November 2021 would bring about the fiftieth anniversary of the most famous skyjacking of all, D.B. Cooper’s Thanksgiving Day 1971 “parajacking” of a Northwest Orient Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon (my home town at the time) to Seattle. I decided to write a long essay about aviation fiction and how the Golden Age of Skyjacking changed the very nature of it. To write the essay, however, I had to do a ton of reading. Normally I’m not a fan of required reading. I prefer to pick my next book almost randomly just by combing through my shelves, or the shelves of some good local used bookstore. But for the Aviation Fiction essay, which was published in Quillette in November of 2021, I found it necessary to read – and in many cases, re-read – a lot of airplane fictions (and even some nonfictions). Fortunately, the task proved to be highly enjoyable because, as you may have guessed, I like airplane stories. Among the airplane books I read this year were titles such as Robert Serling’s She’ll Never Get Off The Ground, Julia Cooke’s Come Fly The World, James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, Arthur Hailey’s Runway Zero-Eight, The President’s Plane Is Mission (Robert Serling again), McDermott’s Sky (Serling again), Come Fly With Us: A Global History of the Airline Hostess by Johanna Omelia and Michael Waldock, Ernest K. Gann’s Band of Brothers and The Aviator, Neville Shute’s Round the Bend, and Frederick Forsyth’s The Shepherd.
THE 2021 MIMSIE AWARDS
THE 2021 MIMSIE AWARDS
THE 2021 MIMSIE AWARDS
The year 2021 was an odd one for me as a reader. Much of the reading I did was done in the service of some article I was writing. I’ve always wanted to write a long essay in praise of twentieth-century aviation fiction – i.e., novels written by the likes of Ernest K. Gann, Robert Serling, Neville Shute, and others who specialized in the fiction of flight – but I couldn’t figure out how to make it relevant enough for some publication to consider running it. But, early in 2021 I read The Skies Belong To Us, Brendan I. Koerner’s excellent nonfiction book from 2013 about the so-called “Golden Age of Skyjacking,” which stretched from 1965 to 1972. The book reminded me that November 2021 would bring about the fiftieth anniversary of the most famous skyjacking of all, D.B. Cooper’s Thanksgiving Day 1971 “parajacking” of a Northwest Orient Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon (my home town at the time) to Seattle. I decided to write a long essay about aviation fiction and how the Golden Age of Skyjacking changed the very nature of it. To write the essay, however, I had to do a ton of reading. Normally I’m not a fan of required reading. I prefer to pick my next book almost randomly just by combing through my shelves, or the shelves of some good local used bookstore. But for the Aviation Fiction essay, which was published in Quillette in November of 2021, I found it necessary to read – and in many cases, re-read – a lot of airplane fictions (and even some nonfictions). Fortunately, the task proved to be highly enjoyable because, as you may have guessed, I like airplane stories. Among the airplane books I read this year were titles such as Robert Serling’s She’ll Never Get Off The Ground, Julia Cooke’s Come Fly The World, James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, Arthur Hailey’s Runway Zero-Eight, The President’s Plane Is Mission (Robert Serling again), McDermott’s Sky (Serling again), Come Fly With Us: A Global History of the Airline Hostess by Johanna Omelia and Michael Waldock, Ernest K. Gann’s Band of Brothers and The Aviator, Neville Shute’s Round the Bend, and Frederick Forsyth’s The Shepherd.