Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Are You Happy In This Modern World?

The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

How to Break Up With Your Phone by Catherine Price

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A double-header! I read these back-to-back and, while that was super fun for me, I would recommend picking one or the other. The Shallows is a sharply-observed exploration of what the internet is doing to our brains and how that is affecting… everything. First published in 2010, author Nicholas Carr was responding to rapidly shrinking computers and laptops and how the ability to access the internet from anywhere was altering our minds and society. Smart phones were not yet ubiquitous (the first iPhone was released […]

“Breaking up with your phone means giving yourself the space, freedom, and tools necessary to create a new, long-term relationship with it, one that keeps what you love about your phone and gets rid of what you don’t.”

How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life by Catherine Price

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In one word: Transformative I was a late adopter of the smartphone, someone who said that they didn’t need or want “all of that” on their phone. In 2010 I started a new job and at the end of my first meeting at my new gig, everyone pulled out their phones to plan the next meeting and I realized I was the only person who was going to have to go back to my office to consult a calendar. I saw then that I “needed” […]

I just need to focus on me right now

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Over the last three months, I’ve been trying to get my life in order, throwing out the things I don’t want/like/need, part middle-aged decluttering and part long-term strategy to go on offense against depression. I’ve already given up alcohol, caffeine, and sweets. My next target: mindless phone use. So when Lollygagger mentioned How to Break Up with Your Phone in a Pajiba comment, I knew it was going to the top of my BUY IT NOW list. She reviewed it here on CBR the day […]

It’s Time to Re-Prioritize My Time

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Best for: Anyone who realizes that their phone has become less of a tool and more of an additional appendage. In a nutshell: Catherine Price provides evidence for the dangers of too much phone use, and offers an EFFECTIVE (in my experience) 30-day program to be more intentional in our use of it. Worth quoting: “Smartphones have infiltrated our lives so quickly and so thoroughly that we have never stopped to think about what we actually want our relationships with them to look like.” “What […]



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