⏳ 4 Non-Fiction Books About Time
Hello and welcome to Pleasure Reading. I'm your host, Amelia Ruby, and this is a podcast about the pleasure of reading, where I share curated reading lists, author rankings, chats with my bookish friends and more. If you, too, take pleasure in reading, I hope that you will subscribe and share the show with a friend. Cheers to your next best book. Hello, and welcome to Pleasure Reading, a podcast where I, Amelia Freebee, share curated book lists, as well as some timely TBRs and even a few chats with bookish friends.
Amelia Hruby:Before we get into today's episode, I just wanna say that I am so grateful that you tune into this show, and I would really appreciate it if you would take a moment to leave a five star rating and review for us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. I am doing some tiny things to try and grow the show this spring, and you sharing your thoughts and giving us a good rating just helps provide a little social proof to other folks who are thinking about tuning in, and it means the world to me as well. So if you have time, if your hands are free right now, I would truly appreciate if you would pull out your phone or pop to your computer and leave us that rating and review on your podcast app of choice. And while you do that, I'm gonna tell you about four books that I've been reading about time. It's been a minute since I've done a nonfiction TBR.
Amelia Hruby:I have to be honest, nonfiction takes me a lot longer to read and I haven't even finished all the books in this list. And that's because I feel like with a lot of the nonfiction I read, it's not really a linear sort of, like, I'm gonna sit down and read this from start to finish, and I'm not gonna stop reading this book until I finish it. It's more like I go to them with a question or an interest and I start reading and I'll read until I feel kind of satiated, and then I might pick it up again to answer a question or I might pick it up to revisit a certain chapter or as a resource for something else. And that's actually how I came to these four books because I have been writing my own book this winter and spring, and it's a book about social media and attention. But as I was writing it, I realized that attention is all about time.
Amelia Hruby:So I started reading these other books about time, and this episode is born from that reading list. And the first book about time that I wanna recommend is called Saving Time, Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell. Now you might recognize Jenny Odell's name from her super popular New York Times bestseller, How to Do Nothing, which was a very popular book when it came out, I think in 2019 or 2020. And that book was about the attention economy, which then led Jenny Odell to write this next book about time. So you can see that I'm on my own kind of Jenny Odell writing path here.
Amelia Hruby:But in saving time, Jenny Odell really tries to break down this concept of spending time. We're thinking about how we spend time, and she asks this question, what if we don't have time to spend? And in order to answer that question, she does a really deep dive into the structure of our society and how our society relates to time through the clock. And she talks a lot about how clock time has been developed by factories and scientific management, and basically why the clock is built for profit and not people. And that's why so many of us end up trying to optimize every moment of our lives because we've been so trained through schools and workplaces that every second of time is valuable only if we spend it the correct way.
Amelia Hruby:So it's not good enough just to exist in time, but we must spend our time wisely and well. And that idea of spending time makes time an economic resource. And in this book, Jenny Odell breaks that down so beautifully. Like the fact that I can even speak about time in this way is a testament to how much I learned from this book. And Saving Time is one of the books on this list I have read from cover to cover.
Amelia Hruby:I have finished the whole thing. I highly encourage you to pick up your own copy of Saving Time by Jenny Odell. The next book on this list is actually a book by someone who I've had on my other podcast, Off the Grid, and she has quickly become a friend, at least a new friend of mine. And her name is Maria Bowler and she wrote a book called Making Time, A New Vision for Crafting a Life Beyond Productivity. Maria is a writer, a coach, and a retreat leader who has a very cool background.
Amelia Hruby:She's done everything from work as a magazine editor in New York City to teach creative writing at universities, to get a master's in religion from Yale and go live with nuns for two years. So she has such a varied and interesting background, and she's just worked really deeply with artists and creative people. And in writing this book, she really breaks down all of the ways that productivity harms us and our attempts to be more productive, actually make us feel less satisfied with how we spend our time. And she breaks down really clearly how, when we're focused on productivity, we will always just do more. There's nothing else to do except to do more in productivity culture.
Amelia Hruby:And she opposes that to focusing on creativity, where, when we're focused on creative action, we're always working toward more life rather than more doing. And so I really appreciate how she critiques productivity culture and helped me see personally many ways that it was still embedded in my approach to my day to day and how I manage my calendar and in like the little voice in my head that tells me I'm never doing enough. And then through all of that undoing, she also gets at some of the, like, sneakier ways that we, like, rebel against productivity culture to our detriment when we punish or discipline ourselves or judge ourselves for not getting something done. Or when we say things like, well, if you're not writing, you're not a writer. And then in the third part of her book, she really centers us in what it means to be a maker instead of a doer and all the ways that creativity can help us bring our inner world to the outer world and generate and regenerate life in the process.
Amelia Hruby:So this whole book is really an argument for creating more instead of doing less and tries to show that the path toward beautiful, fulfilling lives isn't about clearing our calendars because it's actually not about our calendars at all. And I have to say that was just something I really needed to hear. So if you are an artist or a small business owner or just a person who wants to feel more fulfilled in your day to day life, and you have a sneaking feeling that your attempts at becoming more productive or figuring out productivity aren't actually working for you, then you're definitely gonna wanna pick up a copy of Making Time by Maria Bowler. And I think I still have a link from my other show to pick up the book with a discount and free US shipping. So I will put that in the show notes because Maria's publisher very kindly sponsored my podcast Off the Grid this winter.
Amelia Hruby:So I'll grab that link in the show notes for all of you here as well. Now, the next two books on this list are the ones that I have not finished reading. So I have read all of Saving Time and Making Time and also just deeply engaged with those authors And these next two books are a little newer to me, but I'm very excited to share them with you. I've been making my way through slowly. I shall continue to do so, but it felt like they were ready to be recommended.
Amelia Hruby:I know that they are good, and I can't wait to tell you about them. So the third book on this list is Dismantling the Master's Clock on Race, Space and Time by Rashida Phillips. This is a book about quantum physics. I gotta be honest. It is a book about time and space, and it is a book about time and space from the perspective of Afro diasporic temporalities and Black futurism.
Amelia Hruby:I had come across Rashida Phillips' work through the Black Quantum Futurism project, which is really like an art duo that Rashida is a part of. And they had put out these zines about time travel that I thought were really cool and interesting, and just inviting me to think about things like, why can't reliving a memory be considered time travel? That was a prompt in one of the zines that really stuck with me. And so when I saw that this book was coming out, because it just came out in 2025, it's very new, I saw it and I knew I had to get a copy. I was so thrilled.
Amelia Hruby:I ordered it immediately with rush shipping. That's how excited I was about this book, and let me tell you, it does not disappoint. What I've learned from this book is that the conception of time as linear and a sort of march from birth to death is a pretty white Western colonial conception of time. And we don't have to think of time that way. In fact, we can understand time as a complex interaction of past present, and future.
Amelia Hruby:And we can subvert this sort of linear time, space time paradigm by opening other visions and possibilities. What I'm loving about this book is the way that it both reimagines time, reminds us that there are different ways of envisioning and revisioning time, And then also makes a very clear argument for the ways that the colonial conception of time has harmed particularly black and Afro diasporic communities and how reparations need to be made for that. So there's a whole section of the book on reparative temporal justice that I just honestly, it was, like, blowing my mind as I was reading it. So if you want to get nonlinear and undo any whitewashing of your relationship to time, and in fact, like, reimagine time as a communal experience rather than simply an individual one, then I highly recommend Dismantling the Master's Clock by Rashida Phillips. This book also, I will just say, is like a PS, it was published by AK Press, which is an amazing radical press that I love and who put out such good books and such affordable books and such smart, brilliant books.
Amelia Hruby:So just, you know, like, get a copy of it. You won't regret it. Okay. And then the final book on this list of my four fave nonfiction reads about time was recommended to me by another person who was a guest on my podcast Off the Grid. And that is my friend, Liz Milirelli.
Amelia Hruby:And the book is World Enough and Time by Christian McEwen. This book really brings a spiritual and literary approach to slowness, to slowing down, to changing our pace and to refusing to rush through our days in the way that we are encouraged to by our fast paced capitalist society. The first chapter of the book is on what Christian McKeown calls hurry sickness, and it starts off with this really strong argument for slowing down and for doing less. And with this kind of encouragement or imperative even to release the hold that technology has on us and to return to the natural world and its rhythms, and to begin to re sync ourselves with the planet and with other people in the process. Something I really appreciate about this book is how literary it is.
Amelia Hruby:I feel like dismantling the master's clock is like in conversation with physicists and with black philosophers. And Saving Time is in conversation with a lot of different philosophers and the contemporary art community that Jenny Odell is a part of. And then Maria's book Making Time is kind of in conversation with itself. It feels more meditative and based on personal experience. So what I like about World Enough and Time is that the interlocutors here are writers and poets.
Amelia Hruby:It's so literary. Like, Christian McEwen's in conversation with novels and specific poems. And I felt like, in a certain sense, I was reading kind of like a Julia Cameron book because I feel like she's also always in conversation with artists and books and poems and films, and that was kind of the vibe I was getting here at times. There's certainly some philosophy. We see references to Walter Benjamin and other philosophers that I'm not remembering right now, but I think that this is really a book for writers and artists who want to slow down and return to their creative practice by returning to the kind of wildness of being a human animal and one who lives in the natural world and isn't always working against it.
Amelia Hruby:So that my friend is my list of four nonfiction books about time, all of which I highly recommend. Just to recap briefly, the first book I talked about was Saving Time by Jenny Odell. That is a creative philosophical book on understanding the nature of the clock and calendar that many of us live our lives by and how to disconnect from that. Then I talked about Making Time by Maria Bowler, which is really a book about productivity and replacing the emphasis on productivity in our lives with a newfound understanding and practice of creativity. Then I talked about dismantling the master's clock by Rashida Phillips, which is a really smart, thoughtful, actionable book about experiencing time both forward and backward, understanding time as quantum and nonlinear, and digging into the ways that white Western time has oppressed black and African communities across the world.
Amelia Hruby:And then finally, I shared World Enough and Time by Christian McEwen, which is a book for all the poets among us who seek to slow down and get back to the world. And as she says, return to our souls instead of the crazy busyness of high speed, high-tech life. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Pleasure Reading. I hope you enjoyed this nonfiction list. I do do these from time to time, even though perhaps romance and thrillers and fiction reads are more my speed most days.
Amelia Hruby:If you enjoyed this episode, I would truly appreciate a rating and review on your podcast listening app of choice. And I mentioned at the top of the episode, I'm looking for a few more ratings and reviews in Apple Podcasts particularly to help me share the show more widely this spring. If you can take a moment to do that, I truly appreciate it. And if you would like to purchase any of these books yourself, there are links in the show notes. If you make a purchase through those links, I receive a small affiliate payment that helps me keep making this show for all of you.
Amelia Hruby:I hope that you've enjoyed the time you've spent with this episode, all puns intended. And until next time, cheers to your next best book.