No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life
Heather Menzies
(Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver: 2005)
READ: December 2005 (incomplete)
I'm going to save us all some time and excerpt from my Thursday, December 29, 2005 blog entry titled "Books I Have Known and Hated" (with an obligatory shoutout to Pierre Berton):
That advice ["Why read a book you don't enjoy?"] was exactly what I heeded about two hours ago when I decided, about 112 pages in (with another 170 or so to go), that I was not going to continue reading No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life by Heather Menzies. Please note - and rejoice in! - its removal from my "Currently Reading" list. I have decided that I, in fact, have no time to read No Time. You know there's a problem with a book about the need to destress and uncomplicate life when every second sentence is roundabout, confusing and just plain perplexing. The introduction to the book caused me to have a minor panic attack. The sentence that caused me to quit? "The nanosecond speed with which symbols can move, morph and be recombined into new patterns of daunting complexity leaves no pause in which these largely anonymous abstractions can be checked out for their relevance to us personally, or as professional teams or institutions." 'Nuff said.
The book was stressing me out. I found it poorly written, as if the author had run out of time and couldn't edit it properly. And I decided, if there really wasn't enough time to do what I need to do in "modern life", I wasn't going to waste any more of it on this book.
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