Reading While Traveling

I can't write while I'm traveling, except perhaps some notes for future development.
Give me more than a weekend in a hotel or motel and I can set up shop and get to work, yes. But I'm thinking about those days when you go to an airport or drive to some place some hours away. I consider that time out from my work. And more time for reading.
Reading on airplanes I see as part of my job description and I always choose carefully what I'll bring along on a flight. A good thriller always works if there is a new one available, something by John Le Carre would be my optimum choice, or a new novel by Alan Furst. I always carry an extra thriller for outbound and return flights in case calamity strikes and we get stranded in an airport or the book I have at hand is something that takes less time to finish than I had first imagined.
Thrillers, yes, mainly. Unless I have a hard reviewing deadline for a mainstream book I'll take thrillers as my first choice for airplane reading.
Why is that the case? First of all the best of this literary kind takes you so firmly by the hand and pulls you into a plot--oh, how I mourn Michael Crichton every flight I take! His novels were the best of their kind!--that you scarcely notice how smooth or bumpy a flight might be, and you don't pay much attention to the talkers, if you're unlucky enough to be seated near some folks like that. As my dear late friend John Gardner used to say, you fall into a good book as though experiencing a waking dream, and that's usually the case for me when I'm reading, traveling, flying.
At home or in another location where I'll be staying for a while I take up my regular reading of mainstream fiction, always looking for a masterpiece with the same intensity as while traveling, mainly, as I said, while flying, that I hope for the most completely engrossing plot-driven book I can find.
That's my by now old and strict habit. Though if somehow Michael Crichton returned to life and began writing again, I suppose I would anything new he wrote while sitting still in one place, at home.