Finished reading White Noise the other day. So good. I wrote about it on my personal blog if you're interested. Something I liked about that book specifically was that it was all journalism pieces. I hate reading online articles. Reading on a screen sucks and then there's also a million ads and subscription requests and all this other stuff in the way. Like do you want me to read this piece or not??
Having it printed out in a book is really nice because of the physical design of a book. There's no camera watching you, no statistics being taken on your page turns, no distractions besides your own life happening in the background. Just holding a book feels good and different from your phone. Reading White Noise was cool for that--reading back-to-back articles as a book.
In that way it also reminded me of Ta-Nehisi Coates's book We Were Eight Years in Power, which is all of his Atlantic pieces on Obama, plus introductions to the pieces. I like his writing even tho he's way to romantic about Obama who is a literal war criminal. But that book was really good in the moment, nice to carry around, and felt good reading his words outside of the context of the internet.
-Rachel Wagner 2020
