scholar_farmerAlso, here’s a shout out to Alex Zudor’s Roman mystery series (Vox Populi, Male Parte, etc). The titles are a Latin phrase but the books are in English. They are the perfect airplane read: good story line, not too tense, smart references (which is to say, makes the reader feel smart w/shared familiarity of cultural allusions), and relatively short. Better than the in-flight movies; I jump started my trip to Asia by reading three of them on the airplane!