Hanging Out by Sheila Liming

Thank you @NikkiTgriffiths , @Seeshespeak and @Melivillehouse for letting me part of this tour and reviewing this book. I love the front cover its very eye catching witch would make me pick up to read the blurb. I like the title to. I found hanging out very instresting read its very true how people lost on technology and how we lost the connections in the real world since covid. I found it difficult and awakard going to social situations not knowing what to say or woundering if people want me there all because we been locjed away. I like how Sheila highlights her importance for us to hang out togther and how socialsing has changed through the years. Hanging out is written well and easy to get into and the topic is well researched. 4 stars. The digital age has consumed us. Every time we unlock our phones, we disengage from our social interactions. As a digital society we have fractured our real-life relationships, splintered our attention and created social voids. We overcompensate for these lost connections by using our phones to text / DM / chat with our friends, yet never see them IRL. It’s a cycle that seems unbreakable, so how do we reconnect? Sheila Liming, an emerging voice and feminist critic, has the simple answer: We need to hang out more. In her engaging new book, Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, Liming reveals why unstructured social time is a key element to our cultural vitality. When people set aside time to hangout, they assert their right to be non- productive in the economic sense, Liming explains, and they instead are productive in a different way, creating bonds with other humans. Hanging Out makes an intelligent case for the importance of this most casual of social structures, and shows us how just getting together can be a potent act of resistance all on its own. It invites readers to put their phones away (facedown on the table), pull up a chair and hangout for a bit. Author Sheila Liming is an associate professor at Champlain College (Burlington, Vermont), where she teaches classes on literature, media, and writing. She is the author of two books, What a Library Means to a Woman (Minnesota UP, 2020) and Office (Bloomsbury, 2020). Her essays have appeared in venues like The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and The Point.