fantastic, meretricious, and a happy new year

Tomorrow I am flying to my beloved Washington! What should I read on my 6 hour flight? This, this, or this?

I should perhaps mention that I already feel weird about being seen with The Whisperer in Darkness on the subway, so maybe reading it on a plane is a bad idea? I mean, just look at this cover:

No one sane would read a book with that cover. Mind, I would prefer a gripping yarn to drown out the inevitable wailing child or irritating buffoon. Lovecraft has been called a great many things but "gripping" is not one of them. Also I would like to temper the suffocating tedium of long flights. Sometimes I feel suffocated by the tedium of just reading one of Lovecraft's endless, meandering sentences. Par example, this gem of a paragraph:

"Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled a universe of terror and decay to excite jaded sensibilities. It was a secret room, far, far underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the lines of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Through these pipes came at will the odours our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the kingly dead, and sometimes--how I shudder to recall it!--the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the uncovered grave."

Do you think you have crammed enough adjectives in there, eh Howard?

Also, Lovecraft is not precisely the thing to read when you would like to stifle irrational fears. I am scared of many things, including:

1. Flight itself. WHAT IS THIS SORCERY?? Science blah blah but it still feels viscerally wrong to me. Especially landing. I hate landing. The stomach-ripped-through-your-throat feeling. 

2. The possibility that someone will have a rare and virulent strain of tuberculosis and infect us all and thus the world descends into some sort of vaguely apocalyptic scenario. 

3. The less likely but equally horrifying X-Files scenario wherein aliens attempt to intercept our plane, which in turn either leads us all to (a) being abducted and subjected to gruesome experimentation or (b) death by plane crash, which the government will try to conceal, the only evidence of our strange encounter the few minutes' discrepancy on our watches that infallibly point to the LOST TIME associated with UFO interference. (Another thing I don't understand: SPACETIME.)

I probably should have planned ahead and picked up some popular science work (that maybe explains flight or spacetime). Or Death Comes to Pemberley or something. Sigh.

Also, I have approximately a BAZILLION cookies left over from holiday cookie swaps, etc, and I realized that I should probably eat them all before I leave. COOKIE EATING EXTRAVAGANZA. By myself. P.S. They are stale. I may or may not have just stuffed five gingerbread cookies down my gullet in the last two minutes alone. I AM A PROPER ADULT.

Quality post, this.