Writer, broadcaster, speaker. I used to be stuck in fast forward, rushing through life instead of living it. I finally realised I needed to slow down when I started speed reading bedtime stories to my son: my version of Snow White had just three dwarves in it! I went on to slow down – and became, in the words of CBC Radio, “the world's leading evangelist for the Slow Movement.”
By Carl Honoré, Carl Honoré
Our compulsion to hurry and the global trend towards slowing down everything from work to food to parenting. The core message: In a world addicted to speed, slowness is a superpower. In Praise of Slow is a global bestseller published in over 35 languages. The Financial Times said it is “to the Slow Movement what Das Kapital is to communism.”
While researching In Praise of Slow, I got slapped with a speeding ticket….
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By James Gleick
The first book I read to research the cult of speed. It's an exhaustive and chilling catalogue of our chronic impatience: how long we wait on hold before hanging up; how soon we start stabbing the Close Door button in an elevator. The book itself is a little breathless, and it confirmed my suspicion that everything was speeding up – with diminishing returns.
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By Eric Schlosser
Food is so much more than fuel for the body. It's bound up with love and pleasure, nature and identity, memory and meaning. So we pay a high price when what we eat is cultivated, cooked, and consumed in a hurry. This book opened my eyes to the full horrors of the fast-food juggernaut. It also inspired me to devote the first chapter of In Praise of Slow to food.
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By Bertrand Russell
Published in 1932, this essay hails from an era long before side hustles, smartphones and social media. And yet it still feels fresh and relevant today. Russell saw the cult of work as a form of social control – you keep people down by keeping them working. His view that more time for leisure would create a kinder, gentler society chimes with the Slow philosophy. In Praise of Idleness is a delicious paean to the art of doing things – or nothing at all – for the sheer joy of it.
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By Sten Nadolny
A gripping novel based on the life and death of John Franklin, a 19th century Arctic explorer. Franklin was by nature slow, and therefore out of step with the times. At school, other kids teased him for never having a ready comeback. Later, slowness became his superpower, a source of deep thinking, care, and wisdom. Franklin was an early avatar of the Slow movement!
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By Milan Kundera
I love the way Kundera grapples with big ideas through finely-wrought fiction. I devoured this novel in a single sitting. It explores the romantic entanglements of characters who seem at first unconnected. But it's also a meditation on speed, technology, and slowness, and how these shape our experience of the world, other people, and ourselves. Kundera suggests that slowness opens the way to wisdom and sensuality, memory, and the milk of human kindness. A slower world, he seems to be saying, would be a better world. A beguiling journey through the philosophical underpinnings of the Slow movement.
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