You need to read that Jenny Odell book

Aaaaaaaaaaand we’re back — a little tanner, a little plumper (miss you already, beach focaccia stand lady), and a LOT wiser after bringing Jenny Odell’s book, How To Do Nothing, along on vacation. You know it: that book with the pink flowers on the cover that ostensibly teaches you how to get off your phone? Except, honestly, you guys? We think it’s been completely sold short.

Our take: How To Do Nothing might just be the Walden of our generation. Don’t let the florals and the SEO-friendly title throw you — this book is NOT a trendy little eat-pray-love hack for your attention span. It’s a political, philosophical and environmentalist manifesto that also doubles as a primer on western culture (and its many blinders) and an examination on the self’s relation to the community. 

And yeah, Odell talks about going bird-watching and sitting in rose gardens (we’re choosing to believe that’s why the book cover is so floral and NOT because of extremely reductive book marketing purposes…right??), but it’s all done in this amazing parable style that inevitably ends up pulling you into a brief history of labor activism or indigenous traditions and seeing how holy shit yeah, it’s allllll connected. 

So, if you like meditating on lines like “Reality is blobby. It refuses to be systematized” and reading about ornery ancient Greek philosophers and thinking about ecosystems and imagining conversations between Audre Lorde and Mark Zuckerberg, this is the book for you. Will it explicitly teach you how to be on Twitter less? lol no. Will it make you question everything? Yes. 

Bonus points if you have the luxury of poring over the book over the course of several days (it is not a quick or light read, because, duh) ideally alone, somewhere sunny with the sea breeze ruffling your hair, but we’re not picky. You won’t regret it.