If you fly cross-country much and have yet to make the acquaintance of Michael Connelly, well, maybe you'll thank me later. Sure, I've tackled more highbrow material on long flights, but Connelly's mystery novels are the most compulsively readable things I've yet discovered, and they're readily available in the kind of airport-lounge newsstands where you might find yourself scrounging for something on short notice. Yes, there's something almost quaintly pretentious about a novelist whose main character is a crusading L.A. cop named Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch. (He has darkness in his soul!) And yes, the stories can feel repetitive and formulaic. But Connelly is a former newspaperman who cranks out relentlessly clean prose and reliably twisty plots that make turning the pages an easy pleasure, and his attention to the ordinary details of good policework is convincing. I'm always happy to know there's a new Connelly paperback on deck for my next long flight — I just got back from Vegas and can report that The Closers is typically absorbing reading, though it's not a good place to start. Try to get ahold of 1992's The Black Echo, which introduces Bosch to the world. (If you're wondering about movies, Clint Eastwood adapted Blood Work, a non-Bosch novel from 1998.)

Having tackled Thomson's ego-stroking celeb bio Nicole Kidman (and, let's face it — his ego wasn't all he was stroking when he rubbed out that tome), I found myself trying to think what Thomson's writing was like, lo those many years ago when I considered him one of the very best writers on film. The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood helped me remember. It's a worthy goal Thomson lays out for himself. He wants to write a film history text that concentrates on money and personality, showing the ego trips and business sense that worked way behind the scenes to determine not just what movies were made in the classic Hollywood system, but how they were made and with whom. His constant companions in this endeavor are F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose unfinished novel The Last Tycoon seems to shed some light on the movements of the Hollywood machine, and Robert Towne, whose failure to make a third Jake Geddes film strikes Thomson as a kind of tragedy. For long stretches, Thomson's insights are credible, and he has an impressive command of the old-school Hollywood anecdote. But there's a lot of strained weirdness, as well, like Thomson's eagerness to dismiss silent film as a meaningful art form, and what seems to be a general distrust of moviemaking-as-art in general. The prose occasionally grows quite purple, though never with the page-filling obstinacy of the Kidman book. Though it gets to be hard going in its latter passages, The Whole Equation does evoke a century-long businessmen's melodrama on a scale suiting Hollywood -- conjuring sex and money, ambition and regret, Thomson suggests the wondrous darkness at the heart of American film.

A friend was kind enough to lend me this hardcover, a 1968 first printing (on Grove Press) of The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-geist, written by Michael O'Donoghue and drawn by Frank Springer. (Click the cover for a much larger [220 KB] image.) I have no idea how you'd find a copy of this thing (OK, it seems to go for around $70 on eBay) but I like it a lot -- it's a beautifully rendered parody of the damsel-in-distress comics genre with chapter titles like "Peril Diving," "Abjection Overruled," and "Impending Doom: The Early Years." Phoebe loses her clothes in episode I, dies in Episode III ("Sorry, but that's the way things turned out," says the narrator, before going on to chronicle the continuing adventures of Phoebe's corpse) and is revivified in Chapter VI by an eskimo priest (!) who means to sacrifice her. If you don't mind squinting, you can read the whole thing as a Flickr set.