A review by bluejayreads
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell

3.0

 I keep forgetting that Jenny Odell writes works of philosophy, not how-to books - although to be fair, her titles are incredibly misleading on that point. I read and enjoyed her book How to Do Nothing, but was mildly disappointed to find that it wasn't actually about "how to" anything. I don't know why I expected anything different from her second book, but I did in fact have the ridiculous expectation that this book might tell me something about discovering a life beyond the clock. Instead, just like with How to Do Nothing, I got only philosophy, in this case philosophy of time. Admittedly, quite a bit of it was interesting. The section discussing how our modern concept of time came to be what it is was quite fascinating. But much of it is about how other cultures conceptualize time differently, how nature's time scales are different than the ones we humans created during the Industrial Revolution, and mostly about how much climate change is destroying everything. It was something I noticed in How to Do Nothing too, but it's much stronger here. I hesitate to call it "climate despair," but Jenny's writing is clearly and overwhelmingly influenced by fear and grief over the climate crisis. This in itself isn't necessarily bad. What I struggled with most was actually connecting anything this book said to, well, anything. It could very well be nothing to do with the book and just be about me, but so much of this felt difficult to grasp, and whatever I did grasp felt abstract. There was a lot of information here, but it didn't feel like a coherent narrative so much as an acquaintance handing me a box full of papers, each one containing a variety of facts and opinions about time. My reaction to that scenario would probably be the same as my reaction to this book: "Great, thanks! But what am I supposed to do with this?" And that's a question that Saving Time never really answers. 
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