I was intrigued by the blurb that this would be an action plan to learn to do nothing. What it ended up being was a long treatise on the attention economy with a variety of tangential studies mixed with the author's experiences and the evolution of her thinking on this topic as an artist and teacher. Interesting but very slow reading.

Thank you Melville House Publishing for allowing me to read How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell for an honest review. Publishing April 9, 2019.

The concept of How To Do Nothing was exactly what I was looking for, oddly enough. As someone who uses Instagram as much as I do, I am looking for ways to keep it contained a little so I can be more present in everyday moments, especially when with my young son. I want to be mindful that my time with him is limited as I will soon be embarrassing to be around and barely tolerated.
How To Do Nothing is a well researched, maybe overly researched, look into attention culture and why we should be resisting the pings and constant refreshing, especially when it comes to news and things we should be thinking about seriously rather than sharing and moving on to the next notification.
I found this book to be a lot of idea and little action. I know I should resist the attention economy, that is why I chose this book to review, but it was a lot of lofty ideas and little action for me. I found the language was overly complicated making this a book that might be hard to access and understand and unnecessarily complicated her message. Overall, lots of flowery quotes and language and research papers and very little action, and no real life ideas except to resist attention culture, which was honestly in the title.

I found out about Jenny Odell's book after reading a fascinating piece by her in the New York Times last fall about 3rd party sellers on Amazon. I was hoping that was a piece from the book, but this is an entirely separate volume. This book feels in the same vein as that piece - how do we live with the internet and use it without completely letting it take over our attention? It's a little meandering in places, but there are good points inside if you take the time to sit with them. I would have loved this to be a bit more focused, and a little less aware of itself as a book (there's a lot of "as I discussed in chapter..." instead of letting points naturally build on one another). This was a valuable read, and I look forward to following this author's work more.

A dry, academic reflection on social media's impact on this culture in 2019. Many references to centuries past. Introduces the concept of active listening.