Best kind of bus fare offers right amount of absorption

There’s an art to riding a Spokane Transit Authority bus.

I have been attempting to perfect that art over the last year. One of the keys: Picking the perfect bus book.

A bus book must be read in short bursts of 15 minutes or so. It must be consumed in the midst of distractions: People yammering on their cell phones, kids crying, and the bus threatening to shake apart as it careens over Spokane’s potholes.

So over hundreds of bus trips, I have narrowed down the key requirements of a good bus book:

• It should not be overly burdened with plot.

• It should be episodic in nature, with a lot of short chapters – preferably the length of an average bus trip. It can even be a collection of short essays with no plot at all.

• It must not have a confusing number of characters.

• It should not be too long. You don’t want to be reading the same book in November that you started in June.

• It should be relatively light in nature. Anything dense and serious will make you miss your stop.

• It must be well-written – shouldn’t all books be? – but not necessarily the Great American Novel.

So far, the best bus books I’ve found have been Alexander McCall Smith’s “Scotland Street” series. He’s the Scottish author who writes the “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” books, which are also good bus books, but the “Scotland Street” titles are even better: “44 Scotland Street,” “Espresso Tales,” “Love Over Scotland,” “The World According to Bertie” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Scones.”

These books are about a motley collection of neighbors in Edinburgh. The books are funny, gentle, slow-paced and refreshingly devoid of anything you might call action. You don’t want action on the bus, since if anything truly exciting happens, it invariably happens right when you arrive at the STA Plaza.

These books were originally written as a newspaper serial, so the chapters are short and designed to be consumed in short chunks. McCall Smith’s latest book, “Corduroy Mansions,” about a bunch of London neighbors, isn’t a bad bus book either.

I also liked “Far Flung and Well Fed,” by the late New York Times food writer, R.W. Apple Jr. It consists of short chapters about the fascinating meals he has eaten all around the world – marmalade in England, morels in Oregon, dumplings in Shanghai. The only danger is that your stomach will growl, causing everyone to look up from their cell phones and stare at you.

Right now, I am having excellent results with “The Huckleberry Murders,” by Spokane’s own humor master, Patrick F. McManus. This book violates one of the above tenets – it has a plot – yet it has enough wit to overcome that problem.

I’m in the middle of two other books right now – “Skippy Dies,” Paul Murray’s novel about boys in an Irish boarding school, and “Zeitoun,” a true story about Hurricane Katrina by Dave Eggers. These are two of the best books I’ve read all year, but I refuse to take them on the bus. They are so good that they require a couch and at least a full hour of my attention at every sitting. Some books are just too rich for the bus.

I will admit that I occasionally go bookless and occupy myself with a crossword puzzle. That’s a reasonable bus pastime, although last week I discovered a disturbing drawback. I was so intent on trying to figure out the answer to “Thug living next to humorist Will” that I glanced up and discovered that I was four stops past my house. I had to walk a half-mile home. (The answer came to me during the walk: “Mr. Rogers’ hood neighbor.”)

Meanwhile, I don’t miss driving to work at all. With McCall Smith and McManus keeping me company, my bus rides are now my favorite parts of the day.