Love Atmospheric Noise? Readers share 100 books like Atmospheric Noise...

This a beautifully lyrical book. The first chapter winds and twists through different scenes and places, like a gentle lake through a peaceful forest. Emily St John Mantel leads you through the past, present, and future so softly that it takes you a moment to realize the bleakness and horror of the post-pandemic world she’s describing.

I love a story told from multiple points of view, and this one is a masterclass. It weaves different events and characters so precisely that when everything comes to a head in the final chapters, it feels inevitable and natural. I also love a nuanced villain, and (without giving away who) this one is fantastic! I understood their motivation and logic, even as I desperately wanted them to lose.

Airports are important parts of our urban transportation infrastructure and are shaped by regional and municipal planning efforts. Bednarek uses excellent examples and careful analysis to show how building and managing airports has been a great challenge for cities and counties.

In addition to the difficulties of financing them, local governments have had to address the rapid growth of air travel, pressure from powerful corporations (i.e., airlines), changing technologies, transformations in the economy, complaints from neighbors about traffic and noise, and other phenomena that dramatically transformed American urban environments after the Second World War. This book was very helpful to my understanding of how elements of SFO’s development fit into a larger national story.

Airports are also highly charged, often controversial symbols of the places where they are located and of the condition of modern life more generally.

This book was one of the first books I read as I was beginning my own project. It helped me understand the complex meanings circulating around airports (in the United States and elsewhere) since the first ones were built in the early twentieth century. I also appreciated the irreverence and humor in the account, even when discussing rather grim subjects, and this helped to affirm my own ambivalent perspective on airports.

Activism against racial discrimination in transportation was a key component of the African American Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Most stories about this activism focus on buses, street cars, trains, and the terminals and depots that served them.

This book valuably showed us, when it was published, how activism around airplanes and airports was an important part of this story. Doing so helped me better understand the role of racial justice struggles in the broader story of air travel’s democratization during the second half of the twentieth century.

Like me, David George Haskell was born in Britain, and currently lives in the United States. He is a trained scientist, who is also an astonishingly gifted writer. His focus on “sensory extinction” is close to my heart. He understands the joy of listening to the wild music of the world, and also that such music is under siege. In a world of increasing racket and distraction, he recognizes the importance of slowing down. Like Jay Griffiths, he combines deep research with an emphasis on wonder, reverence, and delight.

Just as important as thinking about how music sounds and what it means is thinking about where technology comes from and crucially, where it goes after we’re done with it. This book lets no one off the hook and insists that anyone who cares about music should be cognizant of its economies of waste and decomposition. 

Michael Denning was my dissertation advisor in grad school and one of the most impressive scholars of American culture that I know. What I like about Noise Uprising is that it gives us a whole new perspective on the beginnings of jazz. No longer is American jazz at the center of the universe. Instead, it’s a small piece of a larger mosaic of popular music that stretched from Havana and Rio to Seville, Cairo, Jakarta, and Honolulu. Before reading this book I had no idea that musical recording even went on in all these far-flung places, beginning in 1925, even before the great wave of recordings appeared from Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Jelly Roll Morton. We learn about the origin and first recordings of such major genres as samba, son, tango, flamenco, tarab, kroncong, and hula. All of these styles were deeply embedded in the social and political struggles… show more.

In the words of Joni Mitchell, you “don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” Only a person who has gone deaf partway through life knows what it means to live with and without sound. And music.

In this evocative book, British journalist Bella Bathurst chronicles her profound loss of hearing starting at age 27—and twelve years later, its dramatic return. The health reporter in me gave a thumbs-up to her skillful exploration of the lesser-known science of hearing.

She introduces expert lip readers, soldiers who accept deafness as an occupational hazard, and the copper “ear trumpets” used by Beethoven as his greatest joy ebbed. When Bathurst regains her hearing, I was awed by her description of hearing music anew: “It was a thousand volts of birdsong.”

This book is full of unexpected delights from beginning to end.

The first spread states, “ROAR!! Goes the…” opposite a cutout that shows a tiger driving. The next spread says, “…TRUCK that rumbles up the road,” and shows the tiger driving a truck with a crate of tacks tumbling onto the road.

Likewise, “Hiss…goes the CAR that gets a flat tire,” driven by a snake. A parade of vehicles gets held up behind them until a coyote-driven police car (Awooo!) and beaver-driven tow truck (chomp!) save the day.

Cushman’s illustrations contain even more visual jokes. The sloth passing the pile-up on the sidewalk while pushing a tennis-ball-footed walker made me laugh out loud, even without a vehicle- or animal-loving toddler to read it to.

A beautiful book by one of my favourite comics about one man’s mental breakdown and how music and the people who made it saved him from the worst year of his life. It’s funny and tender and all the music he references was made by people going through their own shit and about how they used their music to save themselves. It’s a book about how we fall apart and how we put ourselves back together and you don’t have to know about music to be moved by it.