Skyfaring - A journey with a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker

Few years ago I read a review, no, a whole page Opinion Piece about this book in the New York Times. Actually, there were multiple articles about this book by Mark Vanhoenacker in the Times. This book is about the love of flying and everything associated with the experience of flying. Not the flight delays, bad food, sardine-can seating and all the travails associated with air travel. This book is by a pilot who was always enamored with airplanes and flying. 

I can totally see where Mark Vanhoenacker is coming from. I was always fascinated by airplanes since I was little, but never enough to want to fly an airplane. I wanted to build airplanes because I think an airplane is one of the most beautiful thing created by man. The sight a of sleek jet taking off or coming in to land is something I cannot take my eyes off even while driving by an airport. Vanhoenacker describes the beauty and miracle of flying in chapters named like, Lift, machine, Air, Water, Night and Return. Each chapter describes his own feelings about the different aspects that constitute the whole experience of flying and reminds us of what is going on behind this miracle that we take for granted. We enter a jetway and expect to appear out of another jetway in a totally different place. And, all this teleportation without Scottie of Startrek saying, "Energize!".

One of the best descriptions in this book is about flying during a clear moonlit night over a landscape dotted with lakes that shine like jewels. I have had the chance to experience this. Another one of my great flights was when my flight was diverted to circle around thunderstorms. We could look out and see the thunderclouds in the distance that had continuous lighting flashes all over. I could see the flashes below me in the clouds. It was a strange and unusual sight to see non-stop lightening flashes in the clouds below.

Read this book on an airplane and all the strain of air-travel will melt away when you just look out the window and see the clouds drifting past or the miniature landscape far below you. Mind you, "landscape far below you" because you are flying like a bird, but much higher than a bird can ever fly.

Vanhoenacker writes the following in a chapter called Water - 

Robert Frost referred to his time on the Carolina shore, and what took flight from in, in a poem titled "Kitty Hawk";

...But that night I stole

Off on the unbounded

Beaches where the whole 

Of the Atlantic pounded...

We have made a pass

At the infinite,

Made it, as it were,

Rationally ours...

Deadly Game by Michael Caine

 Michael Caine is one of my favorite actors, as cool as or more so than Sean Connery. So, I had to read this book when I saw it in the New Arrivals section of the library.

The book is quite readable and similar in genre to the books by Baldacci, Sandford etc. It starts off quite well about something that appears to be nuclear bomb material found in a garbage dump. Soon after it is stolen from the dump, it appears that multiple bad actors are after it.  Harry Taylor is assigned to find the material and the bad actors. There appear to be multiple villains who may be behind the plots to steal the material and then use it for their own apparently nefarious purposes.

The premise is outlandish and the chase is more so. Taylor is smart and unorthodox and appears to get the ideas for the investigation randomly. The authorities are chasing leads that are imagined to be related to conventional state-actors, like Russia and drug lords. Meanwhile Harry is chasing leads pulled out of thin air from guesswork. The final solution is outlandish and straight out of Mission Impossible.

Read it if you are a fan of Michael Caine. It is outlandish but at least not boring.