Reading almost 50 books and finding hope
Feelings after reading "Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock" by Jenny Odell
In 2023 I’ve been reading more than I have in years. This year has felt strange. When I look at the date I don’t resonate or process properly. August 17th, 2023 cannot be the real date. Somehow, against all odds, I turn 27 in one week.
I’ve spent this year rebounding professionally after getting laid off, prepping to move in with my boyfriend in September (something I’ve been eagerly looking forward to since January), and all around examining my priorities now that we’re three years out from the start of the pandemic. The trauma of 2020 doesn’t feel like a valid claim for why I feel so weird anymore. The irony is, I think I’m going to look back at this time and see the effects of the pandemic so clearly. Future me has more empathy and grace than I have for myself at the moment. I’ve been struggling to write in my journal and document this time, something that has always come naturally to me since I started keeping a journal when I was 16. So, when I look back at this time, what will be left for me from me?
But despite all of that, I’m reading. I’ve read 48 books this year. I hear so many people talk about how they struggle to find time to read between working full time and generally being a person and I sympathize. But if there’s one thing I’ve always been drawn to, it’s writing and consuming the written word. Obsessively so.
I have made conscious sacrifices to read more: I watch less TV and am becoming comfortable with not watching the show everyone is watching. I’m trying to spend less time on social media because being perceived on that level and curating a cool online persona (embarrassingly, a habit I fall into too easily) is detrimental to my mental health. I read faster on my Kindle on my iPad than with a physical book. My favorite part of being on Instagram is seeing what people are reading and listening to. What’s a newsletter for if not talking about those things? They have a better home here I think.
The most recent book I read is the best book I’ve read this year. It’s called “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock” by Jenny Odell. It was published this past March. You may recognize Jenny’s name from her previous best selling book “How to Do Nothing”, which was published in 2018.
I read “How to Do Nothing” last year and was moved by Jenny’s perspective on what it means to be present in a technology-reliant world. But I kept wishing somehow that a book written pre-2020 could include insights from the pandemic, and how all of our perspectives were forcibly altered during that time. I was thrilled and relieved to see that a book on just that topic from Jenny was coming in 2023.
Reading this book was pure catharsis. Many of Jenny’s sentiments felt like a balm created after reading my mind and my fears. This sentence from the intro has stuck with me:
“This book is my panoramic assault on nihilism. I wrote it in an effort to be helpful, but toward the end, I felt I was writing it to save my life. As the largest gesture of hope I could muster, the following is intended as a future shelter for any reader who feels the same heartbreak as I.”
“Saving Time” is a book about how we interpret the passage of time, and how we can question the definition of time thrust on us by Western ideals, capitalism, daylight savings, etc. The chapters of the book dive into topics such as disability, mass incarceration, unions and workplace rights and the climate crisis. Jenny’s argument is we are not all on the same timeline. Nature is not on a human timeline. An able-bodied person does not experience time the same way a person with a disability does. Prison or literally “doing time” disrupts the lives of communities of color that are, and always have been, over-policed.
I encourage you to read the book if these topics interest you. Jenny Odell’s meticulous and eye-opening research is worth pouring over – more worth it than reading my regurgitated version here.
In 2020, I felt stripped raw. I felt like I understood my priorities: my mental and physical health, my family, my friends. Now in 2023, I’m trying to maintain those priorities while the speed of the “normal world” tries to catch up again. Sometimes things that happened in 2019 feel closer than 2022. Sometimes it feels easier to tap into my 2019 priorities (career success, feeling attractive and interesting, being the best and fastest like BU trained me to be), instead of face the uncertainty of what fulfillment looks like to me in 2023.
I highlighted a lot of insights in “Saving Time”, but if earlier I quoted the intro, it feels right to bookend with a line from Jenny’s conclusion I want to keep with me:
“Every piece of writing is a time capsule. It assembles fragments of its own world and sends them onward to a reader who exists in a different one, not just in space but also in time. Even writing privately in a journal presupposes a future self who will be reading it – and a future at all. In the case of this book, I cannot know what has happened between the time I am writing this and the time in which you are encountering it. But I can tell you I am living in a moment of doubt. Perhaps you are too.
Anyway, here’s book corner. Here are the last 10 books I read before “Saving Time” and some thoughts:
“Cleopatra and Frankenstein” by Coco Mellors - I’ve heard many different opinions on this book but I really, really loved it. The characters felt real in a way I found a little rattling, in a good way.
“Everything I Know About Love” by Dolly Alderton - Another favorite I read this year. I think everyone in their 20s should read this tbh.
“The Only Good Indians” by Stephen Graham Jones - We read this in my book club! Really well-written and disturbing horror. Unlike anything else I’ve read this year.
“Ghosts” by Dolly Alderton - I was on a Dolly kick so I read her novel too. I liked this too, although I like her memoir-style writing more.
“Yellowface” by R.F. Kuang - A fascinating and unsettling story about plagiarism, the publishing industry and pervasive racism. I read this at the same time as my friend Emma P and I was so happy to have someone to talk about it with. If you’ve read this and you have thoughts I’d love to chat. I gained a lot from reading this review by Terry Nguyen in the Cleveland Review of Books.
“The Guest” by Emma Cline - I loved “The Girls” so I wanted to read this much-discussed novel she released this year. It’s maybe more unnerving than most of the horror or thriller I read this year. I don’t know if I recommend it but I found this Curbed article really interesting.
“American Gods” by Neil Gaiman - I’m a big Gaiman fan and have been meaning to read this for years. It’s long, meandering, strange and not always interesting. I loved it anyway.
“The House in the Cerulean Sea” by TJ Klune - I read this at the beach and it was perfect. It has so many elements I love: fantasy, queer love and joy, and the theme of this whole post: hope.
“Wish You Were Here” by Jodi Picoult - Jodi Picoult fascinates me. She’s so prolific and I think often gets written off as writing “lifetime movie” books but I read “The Book of Two Ways” last year and loved it. I really liked this one too, set during the height of the pandemic. I never write GoodReads reviews but I wrote one for this.
“Daddy” by Emma Cline - Clearly I wasn’t totally put off by “The Guest” because I really wanted to read Emma Cline’s short story collection. I read maybe one story a day because I found them a little overwhelming, but overall I’m impressed by Cline’s ability to capture societal taboo and discomfort in a relatable way through her writing.
Okay, that’s enough. If you’ve made it this far, bless you. Let me know what books you’ve read lately that you’ve loved! If you want a book recommendation, let me know genres and authors you like. I love to play librarian.
A small novel writing update: I’ve typed up 1,406 words in August and handwritten much more. In the spirit of “Saving Time”, I’m reminding myself that my creative inspiration ebbs and flows like everything else. When I think it’s left me forever, it shows back up in my peripheral vision, as amorphous and welcome as it’s ever been.
Mmm okay here’s one last passage from “Saving Time” because I can’t help myself. Jenny Odell discusses a walk she would take every day during a writer’s residency on Maury Island.
“One evening, I saw a strange-shaped figure far ahead of me, moving slowly, stopping, and then moving again. In the fast-gathering dark, there was a moment when I genuinely could not tell if it was an animal or a person. I could sense my brain vacillating, not knowing what to do with this shape, and thus having to wait and watch it more closely than I ordinarily would have. Eventually the figure turned out to be a person wearing a large cloak, now disappearing around a shrubby corner.
In that brief pause, I had experienced doubt, and that doubt had increased my sensitivity to everything. … Though the temporarily unknowable figure had stopped me in my tracks, doubt is not stillness. Something grows in that cut, even if it’s collapsed in the very next moment.”