I recently asked some fellow readers what they reach for when preparing for a trip. Something breezy and fun, one replied; I'd imagine something like John Searles's "witty, buzzy" novel Single Girls, about Helen Gurley Brown's rise to helm Cosmopolitan magazine. Someone else said they prefer crime fiction; they'd probably go for Karen Odden's The Artful Dodge, an "enthralling... rapidly plotted" mystery about a women-only crime syndicate in Victorian London. Personally, I've been leaning into audiobooks for travel, and my favorites tend to be nonfiction with a strong narrative voice, such as Sophia Smith Galer's "eye-opening journey through endangered languages," How to Kill a Language, or Lixing Sun's "rare and spirited" study of reproduction in nature, On the Origin of Sex. With my earbuds in, my eyes are free to roam the airport and spy on what everyone else is reading.