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annagracek's review against another edition
4.0
How fitting to finish this book today, my last full day alone in Florence, sitting at the cafe table outside my hotel on the busy street of bicycles, cars, locals, tourists, delivery men, children asleep in strollers. How lucky I feel to have had Patricia Hampl’s warm, measured voice as the soundtrack to sleepless nights and wondrous days. I have walked bravely and fearfully into a new season of feeding the roots of my creativity and this book was a benediction, a blessing for these useful hours. Wasted but not in the pedestrian sense. Wasted only in the way that sleep is, that joy is, or love.
mcoussens's review against another edition
4.0
The title grabbed me when I saw it on the shelf. It seemed like the perfect book to bring to the beach. Once I started reading it, I looked forward to finding it in my beach bag each time I returned to the lakefront.
Early on, the author highlights the religious teaching in her youth that characterized daydreaming as a sin, exclaiming that if it is a sin, she joyfully embraces the choice of sinner. Aside from the fact that I found that to be yet another validation of my disdain of religion and its institutions, I would have still found the book to be of great value had she not included that perspective.
Her writing brings many gifts. For instance, she characterizes words as music and the mind as orchestral conductor. And, she describes what day dreaming is and isn't as: “… daydreaming doesn’t make things up. It sees things. Claims things, twirls them around, takes a good look. Possesses them. Embraces them. Makes something of them. Makes sense. Or music. How restful it is, how full of motion. My first paradox… this is what is called the life of the mind” (p. 9).
I similarly loved her description of life: “Life is not a story, a settled version. It’s an unsorted heap of images we keep going through, the familiar snaps taken up and regarded, then tossed back until, unbidden, they rise again, images that float to the surface of the mind, rise, fall, drift—and return only to drift away again in shadow. They never quite die, and they never achieve form. They are the makings of a life, not of a narrative. Not art, but life trailing its poignant desire for art..." (p. 100).
Interspersed in her own reflections and journeys, she notes her own, and others', value of solitude, detachment, and the irony that a lack of focus on accomplishment may be the most important of life's true accomplishments. Just as important, she also defines grief in a uniquely meaningful way, saying: “Grief is the unbearable inverse of resonant solitude; it is solitary confinement...” (p. 244).
I recommend reading this book not as a way to waste your day, but as a way to appreciate your day.
Early on, the author highlights the religious teaching in her youth that characterized daydreaming as a sin, exclaiming that if it is a sin, she joyfully embraces the choice of sinner. Aside from the fact that I found that to be yet another validation of my disdain of religion and its institutions, I would have still found the book to be of great value had she not included that perspective.
Her writing brings many gifts. For instance, she characterizes words as music and the mind as orchestral conductor. And, she describes what day dreaming is and isn't as: “… daydreaming doesn’t make things up. It sees things. Claims things, twirls them around, takes a good look. Possesses them. Embraces them. Makes something of them. Makes sense. Or music. How restful it is, how full of motion. My first paradox… this is what is called the life of the mind” (p. 9).
I similarly loved her description of life: “Life is not a story, a settled version. It’s an unsorted heap of images we keep going through, the familiar snaps taken up and regarded, then tossed back until, unbidden, they rise again, images that float to the surface of the mind, rise, fall, drift—and return only to drift away again in shadow. They never quite die, and they never achieve form. They are the makings of a life, not of a narrative. Not art, but life trailing its poignant desire for art..." (p. 100).
Interspersed in her own reflections and journeys, she notes her own, and others', value of solitude, detachment, and the irony that a lack of focus on accomplishment may be the most important of life's true accomplishments. Just as important, she also defines grief in a uniquely meaningful way, saying: “Grief is the unbearable inverse of resonant solitude; it is solitary confinement...” (p. 244).
I recommend reading this book not as a way to waste your day, but as a way to appreciate your day.
tombuoni's review against another edition
A book about solitude, writing, and discovering leisure. Interlinked essays and personal reflections journey through the author’s childhood growing up Catholic in the Midwest, the grief of losing her husband, and traveling to visit the homes of notable experts in leisure - particularly Montaigne and the Ladies of Llangollen.
“Life conceived—and lived—as a to-do list. This is the problem.”
“Life is not a story, a settled version. It’s an unsorted heap of images we keep going through, the familiar snaps taken up and regarded, then tossed back until, unbidden, they rise again, images that float to the surface of the mind, rise, fall, drift—and return only to drift away again in shadow.”
“But what of lives lived in the flyover? Lives that don’t have that powerful, if terrible, historical resonance of radical suffering. Ordinary lives. Mine in middling Minnesota in the middle of the twentieth century. Why bother to describe it? Because all details are divine, not just Nabokov’s. In fact, the poorer the supposed value, the more the detail requires description to attest to its divinity.”
“The essayist sits—he also paces—in his tower. He loafs and invites his soul—as Whitman calls this kind of work three centuries later. Montaigne can survey his entire estate, spread before him from his library where he writes and inquires of himself. His mind forms “so frivolous and vain a subject,” he warns the reader on the first page of his book, it’s a waste of time for anyone else to bother with it.”
— The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl
https://a.co/7f44TRb
“Life conceived—and lived—as a to-do list. This is the problem.”
“Life is not a story, a settled version. It’s an unsorted heap of images we keep going through, the familiar snaps taken up and regarded, then tossed back until, unbidden, they rise again, images that float to the surface of the mind, rise, fall, drift—and return only to drift away again in shadow.”
“But what of lives lived in the flyover? Lives that don’t have that powerful, if terrible, historical resonance of radical suffering. Ordinary lives. Mine in middling Minnesota in the middle of the twentieth century. Why bother to describe it? Because all details are divine, not just Nabokov’s. In fact, the poorer the supposed value, the more the detail requires description to attest to its divinity.”
“The essayist sits—he also paces—in his tower. He loafs and invites his soul—as Whitman calls this kind of work three centuries later. Montaigne can survey his entire estate, spread before him from his library where he writes and inquires of himself. His mind forms “so frivolous and vain a subject,” he warns the reader on the first page of his book, it’s a waste of time for anyone else to bother with it.”
— The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl
https://a.co/7f44TRb
cpardub's review
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
3.5
This book was outside my usual type of reading. Some parts I was wholly engaged for, and others started to drag and lost me. Overall, I enjoyed it a lot and loved Hampl’s core midwestern experience and lyrical writing style.
heidilreads's review against another edition
3.0
Not an easy read for me as the author wanders through her stream of consciousness. I guess I'm not patient enough.
adt's review against another edition
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
4.75
Montaigne connection drew me to this. It is so much more. Listen to it every night to calm and encourage
mcchampion's review against another edition
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
The author was recently widowed when writing the book, as was I reading it. I particularly liked the part at the end reflecting on a poem that ends "I have wasted my life". I feel like that at some level, but loved author's reflections integrating the different interpretations of the poem to the "lean into daydreaming" theme of the book.
This book also led me to my next non-fiction read "How to Live" by Sarah Bakewell
This book also led me to my next non-fiction read "How to Live" by Sarah Bakewell
heidihaverkamp's review against another edition
3.0
I wanted to love this book because I love the title, but I wrestled with it a bit. I was a bit bored by "the ladies," the two famous spinsters of 18th century Wales who lived a life of study and leisure with whom Hampl opens her pilgrimage and book. I wasn't sure her background conversation with her deceased husband worked (although I know too well the power of grief and how it takes over your life). I liked her musings on learning piano, Gregor Mendel, monastic life, Montaigne, and her Roman Catholic upbringing a familiar foundation beneath it all, but I wasn't sure I was seeing how she was fitting it all together. Maybe I didn't want to hear so much about the details of her travels - the hostels, the meals, the rainy days - so much as her thoughts. Or it didn't help me piece things together. Hmm.
mawalker1962's review against another edition
4.0
The book jacket described this book at “a spirited inquiry into the lost value of leisure and daydream.” Having been an accomplished daydreamer when I was growing up and longing to learn how to allow myself more time for daydreaming and the reflection and contemplation that accompany it, I was eager to read this book. It was not quite what I was expecting, but I enjoyed it. It was partly a meditation on the nature of solitude, leisure, language, and engagement with the world. Partly it was an oblique chronicle of grief—Hampl’s husband died suddenly of heart-failure as she was writing the book. And mostly I think it was an interrogation of what constitutes a good life. Hampl doesn’t provide any sure answers—just reflections and possibilities.