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.

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3 people found this helpful

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!

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1 person found this helpful

Great book

Despite the overly formal and AI-like voice, I loved everything the author wrote. Smart, creative, funny, and not preachy or self-helpy.

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1 person found this helpful

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.

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4 people found this helpful

Fascinating content, bad performance

Such a shame the narrator's performance is so stilted and robotic, the intonation and rhythm make it hard to connect with the extremely pertinent and necessary content.

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1 person found this helpful

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.

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3 people found this helpful

Good book but bad narration

sounds like AI is reading this book. Very mechanical and hard to listen to. I would recommend getting a hard copy if it’s possible.

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Ideas overshadowed by AI narration

What a sad piece of irony that this book, with so many points about the pitfalls of progress, is almost certainly “read” by AI. Some great nuggets of info and inspiration, but practically unlistenable — I feel sorry for the author.

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1 person found this helpful

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.

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14 people found this helpful

Disappointed by the outcome

I had high hopes for this book, and was thrilled to crack it open after hearing both the sample and the description. This was definitely the book I felt I needed, but it tragically failed to deliver. I don’t often leave negative reviews on books — in fact I don’t think I ever have before, but this one really did discourage me. “How To Do Nothing” could more accurately be titled as “How To Waste Your Time.” The author’s premise is fantastic, and she has all the makings of a brilliant thesis here, but she ends up diving into tangents that make no logical connection to the book, and then claims to be doing this on purpose as a matter of proving her point. Instead of proving fantastic points that could help both draw me into her message and make me feel empowered to take a stance myself, she casts the reader into muddy pool after a muddy pool. Over half of this book I would suggest completely wasted my time, from diving way too deep into how social media platforms invest their resources, to random tangents about the merits of wildlife behaviour — even that makes it sound more interesting than it is. She speaks to her readers from an academic standpoint, but then tries desperately hard to prove how clever she is. I think this is the work of a brilliant thinker, who needed a supportive editor.

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