Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️☆☆
Title: Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed With Time
Author: Simon Garfield
Genre: History, Nonfiction, Science
Call me ignorant, but with a sub title, “How the world became obsessed with time,” you would’ve expected that the book actually addresses the question or at least attempts to answer the said question in the book, right? Alas, I’ve spent roughly two weeks reading this book and I kept asking, “when will I ever know how the world became obsessed with time?”
Literally, that was the one reason why I was drawn to this book. I was at a time where I felt suffocated because I felt like time was chasing me from the moment I woke up to the moment I’m about to go to sleep. If time was agreed upon to help and assist humans in their daily lives, why did it cripple us so with thoughts that 24 hours a day is not enough?
Instead of getting answers or at least some discussions on the question posed as the sub title of the book, I was presented with endless amount of talks about watch, movies, and self-help books. To be frank, I’m plenty upset. I did not come for talks on watches and how pricey a watch can be, or movies and arts, and, of all things, self-help books.
Fortunately, the author’s witty writing kept me reading this book, even when I asked myself, “why am I reading about this?”
Seriously, I lost count of how often I asked that question, because I really did not want to know about the things being presented to me; it did not spark my curiosity and it definitely does not fall under the things that I find interesting to begin with.
So, yeah, I’m disappointed but I’m not angry. Because I do find the author’s writing interesting and plenty engaging, albeit not on the topics that I wanted to know about. Having said that, if you are ever in the look out of small-talk topics that are not about weather or anything too personal, you’ll find plenty of those in this book.
Taken from Goodreads
Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. The Beatles learn to be brilliant in an hour and a half. An Englishman arrives back from Calcutta but refuses to adjust his watch. Beethoven has his symphonic wishes ignored. A US Senator begins a speech that will last for 25 hours. The horrors of war are frozen at the click of a camera. A woman designs a ten-hour clock and reinvents the calendar. Roger Bannister lives out the same four minutes over a lifetime. And a prince attempts to stop time in its tracks.
Timekeepers is a book about our obsession with time and our desire to measure it, control it, sell it, film it, perform it, immortalise it and make it meaningful. It has two simple intentions: to tell some illuminating stories, and to ask whether we have all gone completely nuts.
Unless you have an obsession with time, I would be hard-pressed to think you would enjoy this book. But, as I’ve mentioned, this book is chock full of stories that would make you either seems interesting and full of boundless knowledge, or your’re an insane person obsessed with time. Either way, it’s not time lost reading this book.
Authors attempt to do the same, for what is fiction if not time repositioned, and what is history if not time in retrospect, events re-evaluated in our own time?
Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed With Time, by Simon Garfield
no page gets left behind 