In Praise of Slowness, Carl Honoré

I’ve been wanting to read this book for a long time, especially after reading The Slow Professor a few years back. In many ways, this book catalyzed the whole Slow movement, and it was an international bestseller about fifteen years ago. So, the irony, of course, is that I was rather slow in getting around to reading it. But since this is the beginning of my annual summer reading binge, I decided that I should strike it off my list first since it’s literally been sitting on my bookshelf for over a decade.

I actually didn’t like the book that much, mostly because it was written before the financial crisis and it really shows. It was written before the rise of the gig economy and the explosion in student debt and the increasing precarity of many people’s day to day existence. Honoré makes it sound like all we have to do is choose to slow down, and there is no criticism of the capitalist system that requires an ever greater cult of speed. Maybe if I had read it when it first came out (when I was a new mother and a young assistant professor on the tenure track) it might have been useful, but now it just makes me angry. While I agree that we should all slow down and smell the proverbial roses, for the most part I think we should be organizing and fighting the system that makes it necessary to speed up in the first place. The solutions offered here are too individual.  Real change requires collective action. The financial crisis ruined so many lives, and in its wake, this book just feels self-indulgent and out of touch.