PositiveThe Seattle TimesIt’s common, now, to be queasy about tech addiction on an individual level. But Odell’s concerns are more expansive — they transcend not just the individual, but the species. Her diagnosis? Every day, we are robbed of our capacity for meaningful, sustained thought by companies that mine our attention for profit ... How to Do Nothing is not a self-help book. It is light on specific, practical suggestions, and the few it offers can feel vague and unsatisfying ... At its best, How to Do Nothing mimics the experience of walking with a perceptive and sensitive friend, the kind of person who makes you feel, in your bones, that it’s a miraculous gift to be alive at all.
Halle Butler
MixedThe NationButler captures the way a person can feel grateful for—and terrified to lose—a poorly-compensated job that is an obvious, miserable, nerve-fraying waste of life ... Millie is surprisingly apolitical for a woman with a spiritually vacant low-wage job, a penchant for rage, hours to burn, and an Internet connection ... Millie is as cynical as a Ferrante narrator without the superhuman perception; as vicious as a Thomas Bernhard character without the rigorous self-awareness ... Without the pathos of real precariousness—she has plenty of escape routes—Millie sometimes reads like the sort of millennial caricature trotted out by Fox News anchors and boomer opinion writers: self-absorbed and entitled, lazy and undirected. There are moments when The New Me almost passes for satire—but the book confirms Millie’s point of view a little too often for this to be the case ... It feels, in a way, like a shortcut, a way to evoke a sense of generational fatigue without getting into the details, and to suggest political heft without mentioning politics.
