The Book of Idle Pleasures

The Book of Idle Pleasures

Summary

The Book of Idle Pleasures is a restorative gift book for the stressed out, tired and hassled. An antidote to our non-stop culture, it is a welcome compendium of timeless delights.

The book lists and reflects on 75 simple pastimes and proves that the best things in life really are free: lighting fires, skimming stones, catching falling leaves, whittling, staring out of the window, dreaming, doodling or taking a nap. The Book of Idle Pleasures is a celebration of pleasure for its own sake in a world of consumer overload.

Reviews

  • At its best, the book has a delightful tone of foppish grandeur, achieving without much fuss a kind of phenomenological intensity in entries such as "Walking Back Home Drunk" or "Poking the Fire". Remember, too, that most things are improved with "a cup of smouldering tea", on which note I must leave you, as the kettle has just boiled
    Guardian

About the authors

Tom Hodgkinson

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Dan Kieran

Dan is co-founder and CEO of Unbound. Before that he was a Sunday Times bestselling author, publishing twelve books including Crap Towns, The Idle Traveller and Three Men in A Float. He was Deputy Editor of The Idler for many years and still writes occasionally for the Guardian, The Times, the Telegraph and Die Zeit. He has given talks and workshops on raising money, entrepreneurship and how to have ideas at the Do Lectures, Cambridge University and the European Parliament.

@dan_kieran
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