#Non-fiction How To Do Nothing

• Title: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
• Author: Jenny Odell
  
• Genre:  essays
• List of Challenges 2020
• Monthly reading plan
• #Obama’s reading list 2019
  

What are the two lessons in the book?

1. Doing nothing is hard.
2. It requires resistance:
3. refusing the frame of reference
4. ..in which value is determined by productivity
5. maintaining the importance of nonverbal communication
6. …and the experience of life as the highest goal.

1. Doing nothing is hard.
2. It requires rootedness:
3. being firmly established, connected to ancient roots
4. …the present grows out of the past.

What is the structure?

1. Chapter 1 – disruption is more productive that work of maintenance
2. Chapter 2 – to head for the hills?..or remain and escape from commercial social media
3. Chapter 3 – create a space of refusal: “I would prefer not to.”
4. Chapter 4 – how can art teach us new scales/tones of attention
5. Chapter 5 – pop the filter bubble around us and how we view others
6. Chapter 6 – utopian social network, more private communication

Conclusion:

1. It was a collection of ramblings of Ms Odell
2. …hoping to come across as philosophical.
3. I couldn’t get through a single chapter.
4. I started each one, hoping it would be
5. …less awful than the last, to no avail.
6. The book was OK…
7. ….but I would not have included
8. it on a best books list!
9. #DisappointedObama !