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How to Do Nothing
- Resisting the Attention Economy
- Narrated by: Rebecca Gibel
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Categories: Politics & Social Sciences, Philosophy
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Mediocre
- The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America
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Through the last 150 years of American history - from the post-reconstruction South and the mythic stories of cowboys in the West, to the present-day controversy over NFL protests and the backlash against the rise of women in politics - Ijeoma Oluo exposes the devastating consequences of White male supremacy on women, people of color, and White men themselves. Mediocre investigates the real costs of this phenomenon in order to imagine a new White male identity, one free from racism and sexism.
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In the Dream House
- By Liv on 2020-11-14
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Great Book but the Audiobook Skips Large Sections
- By Anonymous User on 2021-01-31
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Uncanny Valley
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Amazing narration!
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The Very Best Brain
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From much-admired meditation expert Sebene Selassie, You Belong is a call to action, exploring our tangled relationship with belonging, connection, and each other.
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thank you for writing this
- By Jacqueline on 2021-02-22
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- Pathways to Finding Yourself Within the Great Unknown
- Written by: Marlee Grace
- Narrated by: Marlee Grace
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Picking up where How to Not Always Be Working left off, Getting to Center is an empathetic offering to those who are looking for a roadmap for finding their way back to equilibrium. This book meditates on endings, grief and joy, ease, hope, addiction, and beginnings, pairing Marlee's own experiences and wisdom with practical exercises and tools for creating balance and understanding within the natural changes of life.
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Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
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You might have trouble imagining life without your social media accounts, but virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier insists that we’re better off without them. In his important new audiobook, Lanier, who participates in no social media, offers powerful and personal reasons for all of us to leave these dangerous online platforms behind before it’s too late. Lanier remains a tech optimist, so while demonstrating the evil that rules social media business models today, he also envisions a humanistic setting for social networking that can direct us towards richer and fuller way of living and connecting.
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Concise and thoughtful
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How to Not Always Be Working
- Written by: Marlee Grace
- Narrated by: Marlee Grace
- Length: 1 hr and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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This audiobook is a quiet revolution, a guide filled with practical advice to help you curb your obsessions and build boundaries between your work, your job, and your life. From business anecdotes about fulfilling orders to more personal stories about Marlee Grace’s recovery from divorce and addiction, this audiobook is full of wisdom and resilience, with plenty of discussion about ritual and routine as ways to create effective and positive creative life change.
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The Longing for Less
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Kyle Chayka is one of our sharpest cultural observers. After spending years covering minimalist trends for leading publications, he now delves beneath this lifestyle’s glossy surface, seeking better ways to claim the time and space we crave. He shows that our longing for less goes back further than we realize. His search leads him to the philosophical and spiritual origins of minimalism and to the stories of artists such as Agnes Martin and Donald Judd; composers such as John Cage and Julius Eastman; architects and designers; visionaries and misfits.
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The Girls
- A Novel
- Written by: Emma Cline
- Narrated by: Cady McClain
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader.
Publisher's Summary
A galvanizing critique of the forces vying for our attention - and our personal information - that redefines what we think of as productivity, reconnects us with the environment, and reveals all that we've been too distracted to see about ourselves and our world
Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. But in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity . . . doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance.
So argues artist and critic Jenny Odell in this field guide to doing nothing (at least as capitalism defines it). Odell sees our attention as the most precious - and overdrawn - resource we have. Once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind's role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress.
Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we hear so often, How to Do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book is a four-course meal in the age of Soylent.
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What listeners say about How to Do Nothing
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 2020-03-17
ROBOT VOICE narration is UNLISTENABLE!
I am 100% sure that it's not a real person reading this book. "Rebecca Gibel" is a computer algorithm. I don't know about you but I can't listen to the answering machine lady for 10 minutes, let alone 8 hours! I am flabbergasted that they are allowed to sell this. I love Jenny Odell and have watched all of her TED talks and presentations available on youtube. I'm sure this book is as wonderful as they are. I am incredibly disappointed.
11 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 2020-05-13
The book is fine. The reading? I dunno...
Couldn't listen to that reading voice any more. So I just read it without. Love the book and all it has to say.
3 people found this helpful
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- JMS
- 2020-04-05
Not a fan of narrator; content is great
Podcast of my review available on Apply podcasts and Anchor under Audiobook reviews in 5 minutes:
Apple podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=1500773777
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/audiobookreviews/episodes/Review-of-How-to-Do-Nothing-Resisting-the-Attention-Economy-by-Jenny-Odell-ec42po
Much of Odell’s discussion examines the opportunities and pitfalls of our obsession with productivity, and what she describes as essentialism, which broadly describes a tendency to categorize and simplify how we order and understand the world. Another powerful idea Odell discusses is context collapse; think about how you might share your travel experience details with different groups, such as family members, colleagues, or close friends, vs how you’d share those details on social media. For myself, this helped me understand why, although I’m a communications professional, I tend toward the visual and sharing images on social media like Instagram, which contain their own context in a more satisfying way (in my opinion) than text-dominant platforms like Twitter.
2 people found this helpful
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- Jeff Clayton
- 2019-12-17
narrator ruins it for me
That's all I wanted to say - the ideas are great, the narration sounds like a Hallmark movie..... ruined it.
2 people found this helpful
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- Ailsa
- 2020-02-14
amazing!
what a fascinating listen. I loved all the themes Odell threaded through the narrative: bioregionalism, public space, activism and community engagement. this will merit several more listens, as it's packed with ideas.
I'm very pleased I didn't let the negative reviews on the narrator keep me from buying this. I found her to be just fine - she has a "radio" style rather than that of a fiction narrator, but it is very much in keeping with the tone of the book. absolutely worth listening to!
1 person found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 2019-08-24
great book, voiceover is brutal
it’s difficult to listen to this book about resisting technology when the narrators voice sounds computer generated. unfortunate because this is a wonderful book with meaningful insight about navigating today’s world — it’s just plain hard to listen to. in practice of the book, read the print version instead!!!
29 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 2019-09-16
the narration is shockingly bad
The voiceover really does a disservice to the work. It's almost hard to comment on the work itself because I'm still trying to figure out how to listen to what feels like Alexa talking at me for 8 hours.
15 people found this helpful
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- Joan Q Public
- 2019-09-10
just cant listen
I wanted to listen to this book, but the narration was too mechanical and irritating.
14 people found this helpful
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- Kate Woodbury
- 2020-03-05
worst narrator ever
i thought i could handle the narrator after listening to the sample but it starts to get impossible to listen to by chapter 3. it's too bad because i think i would have gotten a lot from this book had the narration been well-done. i listen to a LOT of audiobooks, 15 in the last two months, and this is the worst narration i've ever heard.
8 people found this helpful
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- Rob
- 2019-11-19
Unlistenable
I know that narration is harder than it seems, but this narrator can’t even complete a sentence. She ends a phrase with a level tone (not up, like a question, nor down like a period). It’s just silence and you think it’s a pause but it was the end of a sentence or paragraph.
I’ll check this out on kindle.
8 people found this helpful
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- Alexey Badalov
- 2019-09-05
Not convinced narration is not computer-generated
I find it admirable that the author discovered curiosity about the natural world, but it was hard to listen to the book narrated in this detached voice with a consistently panicked expression, often as if on the verge of tears.
9 people found this helpful
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- Eddie
- 2019-08-29
Long Essay Not A Novel
I love the topic and really enjoy the concept. You need to deliberately refuse certain parts of the attention economy if you're going to live a balanced life. Simply deleting social media apps and running away isn't sustainable. However, the way in which it was delivered felt like listening to a really long essay in which each chapter proves one point, and feels like one long paragraph. I found myself skipping to the next chapter halfway through once I understood the point of it. It is also obviously read by a robot. Sounds like the book is read by Siri. It didn't bother me at first, but once I noticed I could no longer pay attention without the voice distracting me.
8 people found this helpful
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- Em
- 2020-02-26
Narrator voice was distracting
The book is good. The narration sounds like a robotic text to voice app. It’s sort of hard to believe it’s a real live person. Made it hard to pay attention
3 people found this helpful
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- Josh S Weissburg
- 2019-10-04
Fresh, interesting ideas - awful narration/voice
I will have to finish this very interesting book - full of new and provocative ideas about how we allocate and employ our attention in the digital age - on paper or kindle. The vocal performance sounds like a robot, absolutely awful.
3 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 2020-03-03
Robotic voice
For a book on rediscovering our humanity this reader sounds like a robocall. Actually questioned if the voice was a real person. Could not finish, will just get the physical book to read.
2 people found this helpful