House Read: Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari

What I’m Reading: Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenburg
Published: Penguin Press, 2015
Read This: while filling out a profile for an online dating service.

Well, I finally finished Modern Romance. This took a while because I was listening to it on audio and I got distracted listening to podcasts (mostly author interviews with Cherie Priest, Ursula Vernon, or Seanan McGuire) and so my audio time was taken up with that.
On the whole, the book was interesting, but I would definitely recommend getting the print edition rather than the audio. For one thing, the print edition has (apparently) charts and graphs that you can’t see with the audio edition. For another, Ansari, who voices the audiobook, frequently abuses the listener for being too lazy to read the book themselves. It’s kind of funny the first time, but not really. There are plenty of reasons someone might need to or simply prefer to listen to an audiobook and there’s no need to mock that even if you are a comedian.
The information in the book is presented fairly well, but I don’t know that much of it is revelatory. People are waiting longer to get married, taking longer to settle down in general, and the online dating networks have given us more choices, but also made it harder to make a decision. Ok. Cool.
I’m not sure that my life has been changed by this book, but it was interesting. If I were more of a sociologist or a cultural anthropologist it probably would have been very illuminating, but I like archaeology and books, so it wasn’t right in my wheelhouse.