That’s not at all what the book is about, I thought to myself, the spell broken by all of these newly aggrieved 60-somethings. Odell gracefully indulged them by sharing that she is still on Facebook but uses a Chrome plug-in that blocks its News Feed - tricks of the millennial trade - and tried again and again to gently redirect. When the lights came up and the audience was invited to ask questions, a series of arms protruding from various iterations of Patagonia vests shot up and their owners made comment-questions about Facebook - these baby-boomers seemed to want Odell to stoke the coals of their outrage while affirming their inability to delete their accounts.

Granted, I was experiencing a pseudo-churchgoing mood, but still, I found myself moved to tears more than once. I listened eagerly, craning my neck to see her early work, and then the various birds she loves, and photos of the rose garden she visits in Oakland, and images from the performance and conceptual art of various women artists. Odell is a conceptual artist and teaches at Stanford, so instead of reading, she did what amounted to an artist talk with an honest-to-God projector and slides - or, okay, an honest-to-God copy of Keynote and an HDMI cable. I crept around the store before it started, browsing in curious silence, then sat by myself in the back and paged through my copy like it was a hymnal. Going to a reading when it’s not a favor for someone or at the suggestion of anyone feels a little like going to church to me, or as close as I want to get these days. On the day How to Do Nothing was published, I went to my local bookstore to see the author, Jenny Odell, read from her book.

How to do nothing odell