Emily's Reviews > Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

Jenny Odell has really interest thoughts and perspectives on things that can be really eye-opening for sure. I really enjoyed her previous book, How to Do Nothing, and I can definitely see that this book is a continuation of that one.

One thing that Jenny Odell does fantastically is rather than explicitly making statements like "X is bad and Y is harmful," she makes her (anti-capitalist) point in a much more subtle way. She brings up ideas and references that make you realize that the way we think about things is not the only way to think about things, nor has it always been that way. She calls this defamiliarizing (I think), and it's genius. For example, I think wage labor is now so ingrained in our society that it's hard to imagine what else making a living means. But actually, she brings to attention that it didn't used to be that way, and in fact this is a really recent phenomenon that people, especially blue-collar workers, essentially trade their time in for money, and that their time is worth so little compared to people whose livelihoods are tied to who they are.

I thought the first half of the book was quite cohesive and made me think about different ways of thinking about time, not just in the regular gridded way we usually do. There are ways to think about time in terms of the natural world, like seasonal changes, or about our bodies. The way we think about time is so closely tied into the industrial world and I think it's quite freeing to realize that some people need to take different amounts of time to do things - not only work that needs to be done, but also taking care of yourself and your community, and leisure (which isn't just resting time to prepare you for more productivity).

However, I thought the second half of the book didn't make much sense. It wasn't really related to the theme of time, which didn't bother me too much, but I just felt that I didn't really see what her point was in any of the chapters. It was really hard to get through because it was pretty disorganized and her thoughts and references were kind of all over the place.