LoveReading Says
An inspiring book for everyone. If you’re always looking at your watch or frantically working within timescales, or if you’re simply aware of time constantly slipping through your fingers, then create some space for this book in your life. It isn’t a quick read, in fact I recommend slowing down to allow your thoughts to fully access, to savour and consider.
The concept of time is incredibly simple, yet intricately complicated and intertwined within our lives. Jenny Odell (bestselling author of How to Do Nothing recommended by Barack Obama) gives us: “conceptual tools for thinking about what “your time” has to do with the time you live in”.
She states: “I believe that a real meditation on the nature of time, unbound from its everyday capitalist incarnation, shows that neither our lives nor the life of the planet is a foregone conclusion. In that sense, the idea that we could “save” time - by recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature - could also mean that time saves us”.
Here you explore time on both an epic and an intimate scale, it felt to me like an awakening, and a realisation. This is a book that is perfectly placed to exist after the lockdowns of Covid-19, a time when apparently many people aged faster, and gives you the chance and encouragement to look at life and your place within the world.
Saving Time is thought-provoking and thoughtful in its purpose, a LoveReading Star Book and Liz Pick of the Month, it comes as highly recommended by our team.
About Saving Time
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "The visionary author of How to Do Nothing returns to challenge the notion that 'time is money.' . . . Expect to feel changed by this radical way of seeing."-Esquire "One of the most important books I've read in my life."-Ed Yong, author of An Immense WorldA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, Chicago Public Library, Electric Lit
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Saving Time Synopsis
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "The visionary author of How to Do Nothing returns to challenge the notion that 'time is money.' . . . Expect to feel changed by this radical way of seeing."-Esquire
"One of the most important books I've read in my life."-Ed Yong, author of An Immense World
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, Chicago Public Library, Electric Lit
In her first book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of disconnecting from the "attention economy" to spend time in quiet contemplation. But how can we reclaim our time?
In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our lives, even in leisure, have come to seem like a series of moments to be bought, sold, and processed ever more efficiently. Odell shows us how our painful relationship to time is inextricably connected not only to persisting social inequities but to the climate crisis, existential dread, and a lethal fatalism.
This dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful book offers us different ways to experience time-inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological cues, and geological timescales-that can bring within reach a more humane, responsive way of living. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding; the stretchy quality of waiting and desire; the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory; the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy; the time it takes to heal from injuries. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life in which time is not reducible to standardized units and instead forms the very medium of possibility.
Saving Time tugs at the seams of reality as we know it-the way we experience time itself-and rearranges it, imagining a world not centered on work, the office clock, or the profit motive. If we can "save" time by imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside these things, time might also save us.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780593242728 |
| Publication date: |
2nd January 2024 |
| Author: |
Jenny Odell |
| Publisher: |
Random House Trade Paperbacks an imprint of Random House Publishing Group |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
416 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Popular Science
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| Other Genres: |
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| Recommendations: |
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Jenny Odell Press Reviews
Saving Time is an expose of our past, an antidote to our present, and a manifesto for the future. It is rigorous, compassionate, profound, and hopeful. It is one of the most important books I've read in my life - Ed Yong, author of An Immense World
A revealing exploration of the forces that keep us locked in a shallow, commodified and adversarial relationship with time. But it is also a portal to a far richer alternative. To read it is to slip through the bars of our modern temporal prison and experience how freedom might feel - Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks
The rarest kind of intervention: it alters you immediately, and then it lasts ... Saving Time is an inimitable gift - Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror
A rare book that does more than meet the current moment, it defines it - Booklist
Odell's journey to find the best way to use our limited time on earth is an eye-opening look at what it really means to be alive - TIME
Fiercely generous ... invites us to exit the superhighways and explore the scenic detours, byways, rebel camps, the other visions of who we can be while reminding us that slowness can yield more than speed - Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell's Roses
Odell has gifted us a way to move through this intertidal moment by reclaiming our more intuitive, felt experience of the passage of time. ... A beautiful, clarifying, and surprisingly reassuring literary triumph - Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock
Saving Time is about what it means to be on the clock, personally, politically and existentially. The book's writing glows. Reading this book is like being in the company of a particularly thoughtful friend: Odell shows you the truths of the structures you inhabit and then, warmly, attempts to protect you from your own nihilism - Alissa Quart, author of Bootstrapped
From the vast sweep of geological time to incremental seasonal changes observed on a single branch in a local park, this potently mysterious book explores the ways in which we might begin to challenge the cramped temporal confines of our modern lives - Helen Gordon, author of Landfall
By now a legend thanks to the simple but impactful wisdom of her first book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell furthers her argument for escaping the so-called attention economy. ... This follow-up promises to be as satisfying, optimistic, and enrapturing as Odell's orginal bestseller - Elle
The bestselling author of How to Do Nothing ... returns with another urgent examination of modern life - i-D
A moving and provocative game changer - Publishers Weekly
A penetrating, provocative investigation into the subject of time - how to understand and live with it - on both an individual and societal level ... impressive - Shelf Awareness
Temporal structure has its comforts, particularly following a tumultuous three years ... That yo-you effect [of the last few years] drew me to Saving Time, Jenny Odells sharp book tracing the cultural forces that shape our conception of time - Laura Regensdorf, Vanity Fair
One of President Barack Obama's 'Favourite books of 2019' - President Barack Obama on How To Do Nothing
