Saving Time

Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

By: Jenny Odell

Narrated by: Kristen Sieh

Brought to you by Penguin.

A radical argument that we are living on the wrong clock, one that tells us time is money, and that embracing a new concept of time can open us up to bold, hopeful possibilities from the New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing.

Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn't built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it-the way we experience time itself-and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by--inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time--that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible.

In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful reframing of time, Jenny Odell takes us on a journey through other temporal habitats. 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, or the time it takes to heal from injuries--physical or emotional. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life, to imagine a life, identity, and source of meaning outside of the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives--or the life of the planet--is not a foregone conclusion. In that sense, "saving" time-recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature-could also mean that time saves us.

©2023 Jenny Odell (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

Saving Time is an exposé 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

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

The rarest kind of intervention: it alters you immediately, and then it lasts ... Saving Time is an inimitable gift

A rare book that does more than meet the current moment, it defines it

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

It is in the gap between present and future, where outcomes are not yet determined, that Jenny Odell enters with her paradigm-destroying new book ... [A] grand, eclectic, wide-ranging work

Stunning ... Odell approaches time in a way I've only seen previously in science fiction [and] this expansiveness, both thematic and formal, is what makes Odell's writing so valuable and unique. ... It is, ultimately, an extraordinarily good thing that Odell's work exists in the world

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

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

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