The Fax Club Experiment is an interesting book. 100 people signed up to receive a weekly prompt, via fax (!) and responded only under their assigned number. 32 people made it to the end, and the book is a selection of their responses.
I enjoyed people’s deeper thoughts, separated from any knowledge of their identity. The little snippets of life that emerge as a result. Most of them blurred into an anonymous mass, aside from the person I know who I am pretty confident I guessed early on, and #47, who I really want to be friends with.
My only annoyance was that I couldn’t read it on my kindle, and had to read it on my phone. Maybe for the sake of typography? No aesthetic is worth that kind of inconvenience to me.
The questions range from personal to philosophical, many of them challenge the writers to think bigger and more creatively. I liked those ones best – it’s nice to see the inner workings of what someone else does with that kind of prompt, especially with the freedom (I imagine?) of anonyminity.
I read it over a weekend in bits on planes and at airports, and a small part of it perched on a rock in Parc Güell. I loved it. You might too.