
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
A Most Anticipated Book for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Goodreads, LitHub, and Book Riot
A Best Book of the Summer for Esquire, Electric Lit, and Town & Country
A People Book of the Week
From “one of our most profound writers of speculative fiction” (The New York Times), this “tense dystopian thriller” (Time) and “tender portrait of love and care in an uncertain world” (Esquire) is 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 near-future world addled by climate change and inhabited by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. Desperate 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 reprieve from her recent hardships and her family’s addiction to their devices, May splurges on passes for her family to spend three nights respite in the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals still thrive. But when her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives to save her family.
Written with “precision, insight, sensitivity, and compassion” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), Hum is a “striking new work of dystopian fiction” (Vogue) that delves into the complexities of marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities.
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The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things—the strange and the unexplainable—began to happen in their house. Maybe it was some cosmic trial, a demonic rite of passage into the upper-middle class. Whatever it was, the Maxwells, steered by their formidable mother, stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned.
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This Book is Not a Fun Book
- By Julia Patrin on 05-08-25
By: Rivers Solomon
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The Living Medicine
- How a Lifesaving Cure Was Nearly Lost―and Why It Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail
- By: Lina Zeldovich
- Narrated by: Melanie Carey
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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A remarkable story of the scientists behind a long-forgotten and life-saving cure: the healing viruses that can conquer antibiotic resistant bacterial infections.
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Why are we still messing around with antibiotics when there’s a better solution.
- By Mary Austin on 02-22-25
By: Lina Zeldovich
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Mania
- A Novel
- By: Lionel Shriver
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In an alternative 2011, the Mental Parity movement takes hold. Americans now embrace the sacred, universal truth that there is no such thing as variable human intelligence. Because everyone is equally smart, discrimination against purportedly dumb people is ""the last great civil rights fight."" Tests, grades, and employment qualifications are all discarded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word (“stupid”) and encouraged to report parents who use it at home.
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Thoroughly enjoyed this
- By upgrayedd on 04-14-24
By: Lionel Shriver
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Entitlement
- A Novel
- By: Rumaan Alam
- Narrated by: Nicole Lewis
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?
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so disappointing
- By K. Wagner on 09-22-24
By: Rumaan Alam
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The Impossible Man
- Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius
- By: Patchen Barss
- Narrated by: Jonathan Beville
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a “world behind the world” of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world’s most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists. Penrose would prove the limitations of general relativity, set a new agenda for theoretical physics, and astound colleagues and admirers with the elegance and beauty of his discoveries.
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Flawed
- By Michael on 01-12-25
By: Patchen Barss
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Autonomous
- A Novel
- By: Annalee Newitz
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, traversing the world in a submarine as a pharmaceutical Robin Hood, fabricating cheap scrips for poor people who can't otherwise afford them. But her latest drug hack has left a trail of lethal overdoses as people become addicted to their work, doing repetitive tasks until they become unsafe or insane.
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Came For The Science, Bailed For The Porn
- By Becca Mellema on 08-05-19
By: Annalee Newitz
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Real Americans
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Khong
- Narrated by: Louisa Zhu, Eric Yang, Eunice Wong
- Length: 14 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.
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STELLAR STORYTELLING
- By Brenda C. on 05-02-24
By: Rachel Khong
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The Dream Hotel
- A Novel
- By: Laila Lalami
- Narrated by: Frankie Corzo, Barton Caplan
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes.
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The next parable of the sower
- By Jess on 03-18-25
By: Laila Lalami
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Women's Hotel
- A Novel
- By: Daniel M. Lavery
- Narrated by: Mara Wilson
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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The Beidermeier might be several rungs lower on the ladder than the real-life Barbizon, but its residents manage to occupy one another nonetheless. There’s Katherine, the first-floor manager, lightly cynical and more than lightly suggestible. There’s Lucianne, a workshy party girl caught between the love of comfort and an instinctive bridling at convention, Kitty the sponger, Ruth the failed hairdresser, and Pauline the typesetter. And there’s Stephen, the daytime elevator operator and part-time Cooper Union student.
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a great story!
- By cathryn vitek on 11-10-24
By: Daniel M. Lavery
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Beautyland
- By: Marie-Helene Bertino
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she's different: she possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of earthlings.
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Unforgettable
- By Amazon Customer on 02-04-24
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The Ministry of Time
- A Novel
- By: Kaliane Bradley
- Narrated by: George Weightman, Katie Leung
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.
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More than the sum of its parts but…
- By L. Williams on 05-17-24
By: Kaliane Bradley
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Madwoman
- By: Chelsea Bieker
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Clove has gone to extremes to keep her past a secret. Thanks to her lies, she’s landed the life of her dreams, complete with a safe husband and two adoring children who will never know the terror that was routine in her own childhood. If her buried anxiety threatens to breach the surface, Clove (if that is really her name) focuses on finding the right supplement, the right gratitude meditation. But when she receives a letter from a women’s prison in California, her past comes screeching into the present, entangling her in a dangerous game with memory and the people she thought she had outrun.
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Relevent
- By Medusa on 10-10-24
By: Chelsea Bieker
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Rental House
- A Novel
- By: Weike Wang
- Narrated by: Jen Zhao
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,” says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign” wife. Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation.
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Flat storyline with monotone narration
- By Julia on 01-02-25
By: Weike Wang
What listeners say about Hum
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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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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- AngiePants
- 12-28-24
Intriguing look into a speculative future
While the premise of this story was interesting the execution felt a little uneven. At times the story plot lacked direction leaving me wondering where the narrative was going. Despite this it was an interesting look into humanity potential future.
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- Maria Finazzo 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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- 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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- pablogday
- 01-03-25
Nada muy interesante
Es una historia familia, desde el punto de vista de la madre. Quizás algunos se sienten identificados pero no fue mi caso. Es una situación muy común y no deja una gran enseñanza. Desde el punto de vista de la ciencia ficción no cuenta nada muy creativo tampoco.
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- Cathy Carr
- 02-25-25
HUM
Descriptive. Too close to our possible future. Future AI and the scary use of facial recognition and lack of autonomy.
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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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- 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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- 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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7 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