Hum
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Narrated by:
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Ariel Blake
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By:
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Helen Phillips
About this listen
Named Most Anticipated by Goodreads, LitHub, and Book Riot, this “tense dystopian thriller” (TIME) captures an urgent and unflinching portrayal of a woman’s fight for her family’s security in a world shaped by global warming and rapid technological progress.
In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.
Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights’ respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family.
Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, “Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.”
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The Beautiful Bureaucrat
- A Novel
- By: Helen Phillips
- Narrated by: Dina Pearlman
- Length: 4 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In a windowless building in a remote part of town, the newly employed Josephine inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database. After a long period of joblessness, she's not inclined to question her fortune, but as the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings - the office's scarred, pinkish walls take on a living quality, the drone of keyboards echo eerily down the long halls.
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Helen Philips is Kafka strolling through Night Vale
- By vurnt22 on 04-29-16
By: Helen Phillips
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Burn
- A Novel
- By: Peter Heller
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Every year, Jess and Storey have made an annual pilgrimage to the most remote corners of the country, where they camp, hunt, and hike, leaving much from their long friendship unspoken. Although the state of Maine has convulsed all summer with secession mania—a mania that has simultaneously spread across other states—Jess and Storey figure it’s a fight reserved for legislators or, worst-case scenario, folks in the capital. But after weeks hunting off the grid, the men reach a small town and are shocked by what they find.
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Not what the summary says at all
- By jonathan on 08-17-24
By: Peter Heller
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The Accidental Joe
- The Top-Secret Life of a Celebrity Chef
- By: Tom Straw
- Narrated by: Tom Straw
- Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When the CIA approaches celebrity chef Sebastian Pike about using his award-winning food and culture travel show as cover for espionage, the outspoken bad-boy host says no. They push. They'd embed their top agent in his crew to do the spy work. And when romantic sparks crackle between him and the female agent, Pike's all in, kicking off a romantic spy thriller in which the globetrotting celebrity chef uses his TV series to help sneak Putin's accountant out of Russia before he's exposed as a mole.
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A great ride!
- By Jane on 09-09-24
By: Tom Straw
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The Repeat Room
- A Novel
- By: Jesse Ball
- Narrated by: Erik Bloomquist
- Length: 4 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In a speculative future, Abel, a menial worker, is called to serve in a secretive and fabled jury system. At the heart of this system is the repeat room, where a single juror, selected from hundreds of candidates, is able to inhabit the defendant's lived experience, to see as if through their eyes.
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Guilt
- By robert on 10-25-24
By: Jesse Ball
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Origin Story
- The Trials of Charles Darwin
- By: Howard Markel
- Narrated by: Mike Cooper
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Origin Story, medical historian Howard Markel recounts the two-year period (1858 to 1860) of Darwin's writing of On the Origin of Species through its spectacular success and controversy. Simultaneously, Markel delves into the mysterious health symptoms Darwin developed, combing the literature to emerge with a cogent diagnosis of a case that has long fascinated medical historians.
By: Howard Markel
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The Need
- By: Helen Phillips
- Narrated by: Alex Allwine
- Length: 6 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Molly, home alone with her two young children, hears footsteps in the living room, she tries to convince herself it’s the sleep deprivation. She’s been hearing things these days. Startling at loud noises. Imagining the worst-case scenario. It’s what mothers do, she knows. But then the footsteps come again, and she catches a glimpse of movement. Suddenly Molly finds herself face-to-face with an intruder who knows far too much about her and her family. As she attempts to protect those she loves most, Molly must also acknowledge her own frailty.
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Horrible.
- By Autumn Richter on 07-11-19
By: Helen Phillips
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The Beautiful Bureaucrat
- A Novel
- By: Helen Phillips
- Narrated by: Dina Pearlman
- Length: 4 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
In a windowless building in a remote part of town, the newly employed Josephine inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database. After a long period of joblessness, she's not inclined to question her fortune, but as the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings - the office's scarred, pinkish walls take on a living quality, the drone of keyboards echo eerily down the long halls.
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Helen Philips is Kafka strolling through Night Vale
- By vurnt22 on 04-29-16
By: Helen Phillips
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Burn
- A Novel
- By: Peter Heller
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Every year, Jess and Storey have made an annual pilgrimage to the most remote corners of the country, where they camp, hunt, and hike, leaving much from their long friendship unspoken. Although the state of Maine has convulsed all summer with secession mania—a mania that has simultaneously spread across other states—Jess and Storey figure it’s a fight reserved for legislators or, worst-case scenario, folks in the capital. But after weeks hunting off the grid, the men reach a small town and are shocked by what they find.
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Not what the summary says at all
- By jonathan on 08-17-24
By: Peter Heller
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The Accidental Joe
- The Top-Secret Life of a Celebrity Chef
- By: Tom Straw
- Narrated by: Tom Straw
- Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When the CIA approaches celebrity chef Sebastian Pike about using his award-winning food and culture travel show as cover for espionage, the outspoken bad-boy host says no. They push. They'd embed their top agent in his crew to do the spy work. And when romantic sparks crackle between him and the female agent, Pike's all in, kicking off a romantic spy thriller in which the globetrotting celebrity chef uses his TV series to help sneak Putin's accountant out of Russia before he's exposed as a mole.
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A great ride!
- By Jane on 09-09-24
By: Tom Straw
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The Repeat Room
- A Novel
- By: Jesse Ball
- Narrated by: Erik Bloomquist
- Length: 4 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a speculative future, Abel, a menial worker, is called to serve in a secretive and fabled jury system. At the heart of this system is the repeat room, where a single juror, selected from hundreds of candidates, is able to inhabit the defendant's lived experience, to see as if through their eyes.
-
-
Guilt
- By robert on 10-25-24
By: Jesse Ball
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Origin Story
- The Trials of Charles Darwin
- By: Howard Markel
- Narrated by: Mike Cooper
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Origin Story, medical historian Howard Markel recounts the two-year period (1858 to 1860) of Darwin's writing of On the Origin of Species through its spectacular success and controversy. Simultaneously, Markel delves into the mysterious health symptoms Darwin developed, combing the literature to emerge with a cogent diagnosis of a case that has long fascinated medical historians.
By: Howard Markel
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Your Utopia
- Stories
- By: Bora Chung, Anton Hur - translator
- Narrated by: Greta Jung
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In “The Center for Immortality Research,” a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a fancy gala for donors, only to be blamed for a crime she witnessed during the event, under the noses of the mysterious celebrity benefactors hoping to live forever. But she can’t be fired—no one can. In “One More Kiss, Dear,” a tender, one-sided love blooms in the AI-elevator of an apartment complex; as in, the elevator develops a profound affection for one of the residents.
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Innovative and imaginative short stories
- By Bethany B. on 09-07-24
By: Bora Chung, and others
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The Hypocrite
- A Novel
- By: Jo Hamya
- Narrated by: Claire Kinson
- Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
From a fiercely talented writer poised to be a new generation’s Rachel Cusk or Deborah Levy, a novel set between the London stage and Sicily, about a daughter who turns her novelist father’s fall from grace into a play, and a father who increasingly fears his precocious daughter’s voice.
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Consistently boring
- By lifelong learner on 10-09-24
By: Jo Hamya
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Mina's Matchbox
- A Novel
- By: Yoko Ogawa, Stephen B. Snyder - translator
- Narrated by: Nanako Mizushima
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and handsome foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company—are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens and even an old zoo where the family’s pygmy hippopotamus resides.
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Very Enjoyable
- By unco on 09-03-24
By: Yoko Ogawa, and others
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Practice
- A Novel
- By: Rosalind Brown
- Narrated by: Imogen Wilde
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Rosalind Brown's Practice shows us just one day. Annabel, sitting in her small student room, attempts to write an essay about Shakespeare. She follows a meticulous, solitary routine but finds it repeatedly thrown off course as the day progresses: by family and friends who demand her attention and time, by thoughts of her much older boyfriend and his impending visit, by wild sexual fantasies and stories of her own invented characters—and by darker crises, obliquely glimpsed but capable of derailing Annabel's carefully laid plans.
By: Rosalind Brown
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The Artist in the Machine
- The World of AI-Powered Creativity
- By: Arthur I. Miller
- Narrated by: Adam Lofbomm
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Today's computers are composing music that sounds "more Bach than Bach", turning photographs into paintings in the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night, and even writing screenplays. But are computers truly creative - or are they merely tools to be used by musicians, artists, and writers? Miller, an authority on creativity, identifies the key factors essential to the creative process, from "the need for introspection" to "the ability to discover the key problem." He talks to people on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence and explores the riches of computer-created art.
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A.I. is here to stay.
- By Max Dorisca on 02-17-24
By: Arthur I. Miller
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Glorious Exploits
- A Novel
- By: Ferdia Lennon
- Narrated by: Ferdia Lennon
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea.
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Funny, Touching, Historical fiction
- By David Spells on 04-16-24
By: Ferdia Lennon
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In Our Likeness
- A Novel
- By: Bryan VanDyke
- Narrated by: Joe Knezevich
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Graham Gooding is a leader at a tech start-up when his brilliant coworker—and work crush—Nessie Locke asks for help testing a new algorithm. Graham jumps at the chance to impress her, and to improve his floundering personal life. He soon discovers that the algo is more powerful than Nessie—or anyone—realizes. It was built to detect lies on the internet, but when Graham makes a small edit to Nessie’s online profile, hoping to see if the program will catch the lie, Nessie changes in real life. The algo can alter the real world. Now, so can Graham.
By: Bryan VanDyke
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Help Wanted
- A Novel
- By: Adelle Waldman
- Narrated by: Amanda Ronconi
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When store manager Big Will announces he is leaving, the members of Movement spot an opportunity. If they play their cards right, one of them just might land a management job, with all the stability and possibility for advancement that that implies. The members of Team Movement―including a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging on to her “cool kid” status from high school, and a college football hopeful trying to find a new path―band together to set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot in motion.
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poignant entertaining ensemble story
- By Anka Z on 11-12-24
By: Adelle Waldman
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Lessons for Survival
- Mothering Against “the Apocalypse”
- By: Emily Raboteau
- Narrated by: Emily Raboteau
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
With camera in hand, Raboteau goes in search of birds, fluttering in the air or painted on buildings, and ways her children may safely play in city parks while avoiding pollution, pandemics, and the police. She ventures abroad to learn from indigenous peoples, and in her own family and community discovers the most intimate meanings of resilience. Raboteau bears witness to the inner life of Black women/motherhood, and to the brutalities and possibilities of cities, while celebrating the beauty and fragility of nature.
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A Book for Our Time
- By Janet G. Zinn on 03-24-24
By: Emily Raboteau
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Wild Ground
- A Novel
- By: Emily Usher
- Narrated by: Natalie Gavin
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
As a child, it was always Neef and her mother, Chrissy—troubled, beautiful, at the mercy of addiction and a revolving door of bad boyfriends. When Neef turns twelve, it is Neef and Chrissy and Barry, the much-older man who moves them from their derelict council estate in Leeds to a small Yorkshire town where he runs the local pub. On her first day in her new home, it becomes Neef and Danny, the boy who captures her attention planting flowers in the pub garden—and then, it is somehow always Danny.
By: Emily Usher
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Shanghailanders
- A Novel
- By: Juli Min
- Narrated by: Mei Mei Macleod
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
A dazzling and ambitious debut novel that follows a cosmopolitan Shanghai household backward in time—beginning in 2040 and moving through our present and the recent past—exploring their secrets, their losses, and the ways a family makes and remakes itself across the years.
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Beautiful winding journey backwards in time
- By Brendan on 07-08-24
By: Juli Min
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Greta & Valdin
- A Novel
- By: Rebecca K Reilly
- Narrated by: Natalie Beran, Jackson Bliss, Eilidh Beaton, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It’s been a year since his ex-boyfriend dumped him and moved from Auckland to Buenos Aires, and Valdin is doing fine. He has a good flat with his sister Greta, a good career where his colleagues only occasionally remind him that he is the sole Maaori person in the office, and a good friend who he only sleeps with when he’s sad. But when work sends him to Argentina and he’s thrown back in his former lover’s orbit, Valdin is forced to confront the feelings he’s been trying to ignore—and the future he wants.
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strange narrating choices
- By Barbara S on 02-21-24
By: Rebecca K Reilly
What listeners say about Hum
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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- Aydelette
- 12-11-24
Humming Anxiety
Portrays a vision of the future which looks familiar until it doesn’t. Imagine that the future of ai includes empathetic ambivalence.
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- Maria Hernandez
- 11-24-24
Good story, scary reality
This book had me-a-thinking that this could very well be our future. Scary that technology and AI takes over our lives. The need to disconnect backfires in sad reality. Well written and I love the sense of unexpected possibilities that May and may not happen. I would love to see a series in this universe.
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Performance
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- van
- 11-17-24
It’s like Black Mirror in Book format
It was performed well, though at times I found myself wondering if I would dislike the characters less if their voices were portrayed differently by the narrator.
I found the title character to make a shocking amount of stupid decisions for somebody who’s supposedly smart enough to code AI so well that she ends up putting herself out of a job. Often I thought to myself “this problem seems like it could be explained away enough with a bit of transparency toward the authorities” who are the unseen antagonists of the story.
Her children struck me as being spoiled brats, but perhaps that was the point. There are so many instances of them saying bratty things and behaving disrespectfully that evoke a non-response from their parents that I wondered what the point of writing them that way was. I could see why the author would do it if it eventually led the protagonist to snap, but it doesn’t.
The one thing that bothered me most about this story was the odd bit of telling commentary from the eponymous Hums which seems to suggest that they know their own role in turning the world into such a dystopian place. It’s never explained what spurns on those comments or how/why the Hums talk like that. I wish the author had gone somewhere with that.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
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Story
- Dani
- 09-19-24
Bleh
I kept wanting this to build into something great. It never did. It fell so short that at the end it was so unsatisfying and then felt like such a waste
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- Vicki P.
- 08-12-24
Disappointing
I was so looking forward to this book. I pre-ordered it and avidly awaited its arrival in my library.
As it turned out, the book was thoroughly disappointing. It was more a prolix short story than a novel.
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4 people found this helpful
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- NMwritergal
- 08-06-24
Why Literary "Speculative Fiction" Doesn't Work
I've come to some conclusions about those who write "literary speculative fiction."
1. Perish the thought that they write "science fiction."
2. If everybody under the sun can't wait for the book to come out, avoid it.
3. There must be annoying children in the novel, which, if you don't have any, convince you never to have any of your own.
4. It's an excuse to not follow the standards of most genres: world building, character development, having a plot...
5. It's a reason to be vague and ambiguous (though the only thing I liked about this book was the last hour and the totally ambiguous ending--sometimes it works, but I suspect it will frustrate most people.
6. It's about the idea, which may or may not be clear, not the execution. This book had too many ideas, some more successfully executed than others.
7. Most writers can't pull it off. This is a good example.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Steve B.
- 08-12-24
The worse of the worse
I don’t know what anyone was thinking when recording this novel, it is a work of junk fiction. It is worthwhile of trash.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Urban Sophist
- 09-28-24
Hopelessly Sad
The book had its thought-provoking moments, but there were no truly bright experiences, no levity. The relationship between the main character and her spouse made so sense and displayed neither consistency nor development. I think I was expected to like the kids. I didn’t. Overall, I felt quiet desperation—somewhat on behalf of the characters and somewhat for the story to end.
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