100 books like The Discovery of Slowness

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.

In Fast Food Nation, journalist Eric Schlosser traces the growth of fast food across the US and shows how franchises have standardized both agricultural and social life in the process.

As the demand for McDonalds’ fries and hamburgers soared, for example, farmers adapted potato and meat production to strict new specifications. Similarly, fast food franchises reshaped labor practices in the process.

Schlosser’s book was the first to reveal the extent to which fast food changed environmental, social, and health landscapes in the US. And, more important, we see how much fast food—which promises choice—has instead reduced agricultural biodiversity and food choice in the process. 

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.

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.

As well as the characters who populate nautical stories and the sea itself, ships have such a vivid voice.

This non-fiction book follows HMS Erebus from her early journey to Antarctica to her eventual disappearance in the Canadian Arctic. I have a small obsession with polar exploration and this book captures the drama, the terror, and the mystery of it.

Michael Palin’s sensitivity to the historical issues and the real figures is very moving, especially the moment when the primary documents stop and all that is left to tell these men’s tales is a note in a desolate cairn.

I want to also sneakily recommend AMC’s adaptation of Dan Simmons’s The Terror, a TV show based on these events, which has some of my favourite writing in any piece of media.

Well illustrated and written in compelling and accessible prose, Finding Franklin is a wonderful, timely introduction to the expedition and to the extraordinary hold that the mystery of its disappearance has held on the Arctic imagination for more than a century-and-a-half. Potter is a leading expert on all things Franklin and has been intimately involved in the recent remarkable discoveries around King William Island. There are few better companions at this exciting time when it seems the answers to the mystery are at our fingertips.

This is the classic introduction to Franklin’s 1845 expedition. On Beechey Island, Owen Beattie conducted autopsies on the bodies of the first three sailors to die. John Geiger tells the story so clearly that he opens the door to interpretations at odds with his own.

At the northern tip of King William Island, believing he had no option, Franklin turned southwest into “the continuously replenished pack-ice.” He sailed into a lethal trap, one “made all the more cruel with the realization that the route along the eastern coast of the island regularly clears during the summer.” Here, I realized that Geiger was referencing the strait John Rae discovered in 1854, which, fifty years later, Roald Amundsen would vindicate as the final link in the first navigable Northwest Passage. 

Barry Lopez was a nature writer and environmentalist.

He died on Christmas day 2020, and although we are fortunate to have his valedictory book Horizon, published when his traveling days were pretty well behind him, Arctic Dreams is the real deal, with Lopez as raconteur, but practitioner too, thoroughly in his element.

Lopez writes about exploration and the aurora, animals and the weather, ice and myth and survival and joy. He’s effortless. You’ll learn more than you knew there was to know about the high north, and the pleasure is in the learning.

If you must cut to the chase with these five books, Arctic Dreams is the book, because Barry Lopez got things right.

This novel reimagines the traditional polar exploration narrative to consider how friendship and delusion, and privileges of wealth, gender, and ethnicity inflect supposedly high-minded searches for scientific knowledge. As quickly becomes clear, explorer Zecheriah Voorhees sees Erasmus Darwin Wells and Alexandra Copeland as supporting players in the story of his daring life. But Barrett places Wells and Copeland at the center of her novel, suggesting that their more modest, generous, and painstaking efforts enable them to appreciate the complexities of the vast world in which they share. Seen from their perspective, men like Voorhees are supporting players rendered dangerous by their self-regarding search for celebrity.

I loved this book because it told a gripping story of courage, mistakes, and survival against huge odds. It tells the story of a failed mission that most often would have led to disaster—but instead, it led to the awakening of strengths that Shackleton and his team harbored deep inside each of them.

Through this book, I saw and felt the need to reach deep inside to find the will to survive. It helped me understand just what it takes to be successful and how to overcome failure (failed mission).

Plain and simple, this book provided me with incredible insight into what it takes to ultimately be successful.