
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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Story
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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The Memory Police
- A Novel
- By: Yoko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder - translator
- Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses - until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards.
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A Calm, Quiet Dystopian
- By Booky Nooky on 12-13-19
By: Yoko Ogawa, and others
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Annie Bot
- A Novel
- By: Sierra Greer
- Narrated by: Jennifer Jill Araya
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Annie Bot was created to be the perfect girlfriend for her human owner Doug. Designed to satisfy his emotional and physical needs, she has dinner ready for him every night, wears the pert outfits he orders for her, and adjusts her libido to suit his moods. True, she’s not the greatest at keeping Doug’s place spotless, but she’s trying to please him. She’s trying hard.
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Good, but not great
- By Katie Ramey on 03-25-24
By: Sierra Greer
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My Darling Dreadful Thing
- A Novel
- By: Johanna van Veen
- Narrated by: Jess Nesling
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Roos Beckman has a spirit companion only she can see. Ruth—strange, corpse-like, and dead for centuries—is the light of Roos' life. That is, until the wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop visits one of Roos' backroom seances, and the two strike up a connection.
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Holds Out Until the Last Minute
- By Andy on 12-19-24
By: Johanna van Veen
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Playground
- A Novel
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Robin Siegerman, Eunice Wong, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.
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What a tremendous story
- By Deb Hatch on 11-08-24
By: Richard Powers
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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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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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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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All the Water in the World
- A Novel
- By: Eiren Caffall
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north.
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A future world
- By AprilG on 01-24-25
By: Eiren Caffall
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Sandwich
- A Novel
- By: Catherine Newman
- Narrated by: Nan McNamara
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their humble beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, great meals, and messes of all kinds. This year’s vacation, with Rocky sandwiched between her half-grown kids and fully aging parents, promises to be just as delightful as summers past—except, perhaps, for Rocky’s hormonal bouts of rage and melancholy. Her body is changing—her life is, too. And then a chain of events sends Rocky into the past, reliving both the tenderness and sorrow of a handful of long-ago summers.
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Stoppppppp Already!
- By Tara L. Darbyshire on 06-22-24
By: Catherine Newman
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One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
- By: Omar El Akkad
- Narrated by: Omar El Akkad
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege.
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Outstanding - Should be required reading
- By Steve Siegmund on 03-19-25
By: Omar El Akkad
Humming Anxiety
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Intriguing look into a speculative future
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Good story, scary reality
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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.
It’s like Black Mirror in Book format
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Nada muy interesante
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HUM
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As it turned out, the book was thoroughly disappointing. It was more a prolix short story than a novel.
Disappointing
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Bleh
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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.
Why Literary "Speculative Fiction" Doesn't Work
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The worse of the worse
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