June’s Reads & Books for July

Carl Honoré, Raymond M. Kethledge & Michael S. Erwin

As in July, two great works came across my reading table. Both books explore two oft-neglected aspects of our lives: being slow and being alone. Enjoy reading them!

In Praise of Slowness, by Carl Honoré

The world we live in values speed. The untold motto we all unconsciously subscribe to is doing things faster. Getting faster from A to B (as if the outside of A and B is just an annoying necessity to traverse), getting in shape faster, and working faster. Going fast all the time is as limiting as being slow all the time; one needs to find the tempo giusto. That is what author Carl Honoré set out to do with his book. Over several chapters, he covers how we can introduce more slowness into our hectic lives.

The first thing we can adapt is to eat slower, eat more mindfully. While a quick food stop at a fast food “restaurant” is tempting, what we get from devouring such junk is repelling. We eat more (because we do not get the stop signal from our stomach in time), we eat unhealthily, heck, we often can’t even name the ingredients. In contrast, by preparing, as often as we can, our dinner ourselves, we get to know what goes into our meal. By manually cutting onions, peeling potatoes, and seasoning meat we get a…