Timekeepers - Simon Garfield

[glinda]

Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed With Time by Simon Garfield was one of those serandipitous library finds where you've seen and resisted a recently published in paperback book in the bookshop and then spot it on the library shelf the following week. Like a reward for good behaviour. I try to avoid buying pop science books because, as much as I enjoy them, I tend to only read them once. It's an interesting and highly engaging read if you're at all interested in time and the history of the human interest/obsession with it. Given the subtitle, you'd be forgiven for expecting the book to be an inditement of modern time fixation, but while there is a little of that, it's more about time obsession as much more enduring element of the human condition. Providing historical context and looking at the whole situation from a wider, more nuanced and less rigidly condemnatory perspective. As an anxious person obsessed with lists and fascinated by mechanics, I am pretty much the book's target market and as such I enjoyed it greatly. Few things are more reassuring than the perspective provided by other people's obsessions.