Reading List

Authors Like Jenny Odell

Q: What should I read after How to Do Nothing?

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), for attention to the living world, and Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society (2010), for why we keep ourselves so busy.

Q: What should I read after Saving Time?

Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks (2021), which takes on the same fantasy of controlling time, and Bertrand Russell’s essay “In Praise of Idleness” (1935), which proposed a four-hour working day.

Q: Which Jenny Odell book should I read first?

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) is the place to start. Saving Time (2023) is longer and builds on it.

In 2015 Jenny Odell was artist-in-residence at Recology, the San Francisco dump. She picked objects out of the rubbish and researched how each one had been made, sold and used, and the result was an archive called The Bureau of Suspended Objects. Born in San Francisco in 1986 and raised in Cupertino, in what became Silicon Valley, she taught internet art and design at Stanford from 2013 to 2021. How to Do Nothing (2019), which grew out of a 2017 conference talk, argues that our attention is being harvested and that sitting in a public rose garden in Oakland or learning the birds of your own neighbourhood are ways of taking it back. Saving Time (2023) turns to the clock itself, setting measured, sellable hours against the time of tides, seasons and plants. The ten writers below share her question: what do you notice when you stop trying to be useful?

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Attention · Time · Nature writing · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

The closest matches are Rebecca Solnit, an essayist who writes about walking and paying attention to place and made an atlas of San Francisco, Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist who writes about plants and reciprocity, and Oliver Burkeman, whose Four Thousand Weeks tackles the same fantasy of mastering time as Saving Time. Further down are two philosophers who made the case for idleness long before the smartphone, and a productivity writer who reaches some of Odell’s conclusions for very different reasons.

10 authors like Jenny Odell

Walking as a way of thinking

Rebecca Solnit

American · A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), Infinite City (2010), Orwell’s Roses (2021)

Solnit was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1961 and is best known for essays that move between history, landscape and politics. Wanderlust is a history of walking, Infinite City is an atlas of San Francisco made of maps and essays, and Orwell’s Roses starts from the roses George Orwell planted in his garden in 1936. Her essay “Men Explain Things to Me” is often credited with inspiring the word ‘mansplaining’, though she did not use it herself.

Solnit and Odell both write about the Bay Area as a place with a history under the tech economy, and both treat walking and looking as forms of resistance. Orwell’s Roses is the closest to Odell’s method: one small, overlooked thing followed outwards until it explains a great deal.

— Lisanne

Every book by Rebecca Solnit →

Science and gratitude

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Citizen Potawatomi Nation · Gathering Moss (2003), Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), The Serviceberry (2024)

Kimmerer, born in upstate New York in 1953, is a botanist and plant ecologist and an enrolled citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation; she was director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Braiding Sweetgrass sets scientific knowledge beside Indigenous teaching about plants, and The Serviceberry is a short book about abundance and gift economies. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.

Kimmerer gives the long view of what Odell is reaching for when she asks readers to notice the plants and birds around them: a relationship with a place, not just a break from a screen. The Serviceberry is the natural companion to Odell’s chapters on what an economy built around attention leaves out.

— Lisanne

Every book by Robin Wall Kimmerer →

Against mastering time

Oliver Burkeman

British · The Antidote (2012), Four Thousand Weeks (2021), Meditations for Mortals (2024)

Burkeman, born in 1975, wrote the Guardian column “This Column Will Change Your Life” for many years. The Antidote argues against positive thinking and goal-setting, and Four Thousand Weeks, named for the length of an average human life, argues against the fantasy of ever getting on top of everything. Meditations for Mortals followed in 2024.

Four Thousand Weeks and Saving Time came out within two years of each other and share a target: the belief that the right system will finally give you enough time. Burkeman writes for the individual reader with a to-do list; Odell is more interested in who sold us the clock in the first place.

— Lisanne

Every book by Oliver Burkeman →

The original retreat

Henry David Thoreau

American · “Civil Disobedience” (1849), Walden (1854)

Thoreau (1817–1862) was born in Concord, Massachusetts. From 4 July 1845 to 6 September 1847 he lived in a cabin he built beside Walden Pond, and Walden describes those two years, two months and two days. His essay first published in 1849 as “Resistance to Civil Government” became known as “Civil Disobedience”. Later critics have accused him of hypocrisy and sanctimony.

Every book about stepping back from the economy is read against Walden, and How to Do Nothing is no exception. The difference is instructive: Thoreau went to the woods, while Odell argues for staying where you are, among neighbours, and paying a different kind of attention.

— Lisanne

Every book by Henry David Thoreau →

The case for idleness, 1935

Bertrand Russell

British · Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935)

Russell (1872–1970) was a philosopher and mathematician who was jailed in 1918 for his opposition to the First World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. In the title essay of In Praise of Idleness, first published as a book in 1935, he argued that four hours’ work a day should be enough to provide the necessities and comforts of life, leaving the rest of the day for leisure and thought.

Russell made Odell’s argument more than eighty years earlier, in the language of economics rather than ecology: the belief that work is a virtue in itself serves those who profit from it. Read the essay for the reminder that the fight over attention and time is older than the internet.

— Lisanne

Every book by Bertrand Russell →

Seeing, as a discipline

Annie Dillard

American · Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), Holy the Firm (1977), The Writing Life (1989)

Dillard was born in Pittsburgh in 1945. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a year of close observation in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1975. The Writing Life is a short book about the daily discipline of writing.

Dillard is the great American writer of looking hard at what is in front of you, which is the practice How to Do Nothing recommends. Her prose is more ecstatic and more religious than Odell’s, and she has no interest in the attention economy; what she shares is the patience.

— Lisanne

Every book by Annie Dillard →

The exhausted self

Byung-Chul Han

South Korean-German · The Burnout Society (2010), Psychopolitics (2014)

Han was born in Seoul in 1959, moved to Germany as a young man and taught philosophy at the Berlin University of the Arts. The Burnout Society argues that people today exhaust themselves through self-optimisation rather than obeying orders, and Psychopolitics describes power that works through freedom, data and positive feeling. He won the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities in 2025.

Han supplies the bleak theory behind Odell’s practical hope: we are not forced to stay busy, we do it to ourselves. His books are short and aphoristic where Odell’s are rooted in places and people, and reading both shows the problem and a way out.

— Lisanne

Every book by Byung-Chul Han →

What screens do to conversation

Sherry Turkle

American · Alone Together (2011), Reclaiming Conversation (2015), The Empathy Diaries (2021)

Turkle, born in Brooklyn in 1948, is a professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Alone Together looks at how phones and social robots change intimacy, Reclaiming Conversation makes the case for talking face to face, and The Empathy Diaries is a memoir.

Turkle brings the evidence of interviews and fieldwork to the worry at the centre of How to Do Nothing: that our devices are reshaping how we attend to one another. She writes as a researcher; Odell as an artist looking for alternatives.

— Lisanne

Every book by Sherry Turkle →

Rest as resistance

Tricia Hersey

American · Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto (2022)

Hersey was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. In 2016 she founded The Nap Ministry, which stages collective rest events and frames rest as resistance to what she calls grind culture. Rest Is Resistance became a New York Times bestseller and draws on Black American history, including the history of slavery.

Hersey and Odell share a refusal to treat rest as a way to become more productive. Hersey writes from a specific history and with the urgency of a manifesto, which makes her a necessary counterpart to Odell’s gentler, more essayistic case.

— Lisanne

Focus, for different reasons

Cal Newport

American · Deep Work (2016), Digital Minimalism (2019), Slow Productivity (2024)

Newport, born in 1982, is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. Deep Work argues that the ability to concentrate without distraction is becoming rare and valuable, Digital Minimalism argues for using far fewer optional technologies, and Slow Productivity argues for doing fewer things at a natural pace.

The counterweight on this list. Newport and Odell both tell readers to step away from social media, and Digital Minimalism appeared the same year as How to Do Nothing, but Newport wants your attention back so that you can do better work, which is exactly the logic Odell asks you to question. Reading them side by side makes her argument sharper.

— Lisanne

Every book by Cal Newport →

Where to start if you loved Jenny Odell

If you want the walk and the place, read Rebecca Solnit.

Orwell’s Roses (2021): a few rose bushes followed outwards into history and politics.

If you want the plants, read Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), or the much shorter The Serviceberry (2024).

If Saving Time was your book, read Oliver Burkeman.

Four Thousand Weeks (2021): why you will never get on top of everything, and why that is a relief.

If you want the counter-argument, read Cal Newport.

Digital Minimalism (2019): the same advice to log off, for the opposite reason.

If you want more Odell, start with How to Do Nothing.

Then Saving Time (2023), which widens the argument from attention to the clock itself.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Jenny Odell

Who writes like Jenny Odell?

Rebecca Solnit, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Oliver Burkeman are the closest: Solnit for walking and place, Kimmerer for paying attention to plants, Burkeman for the argument against mastering time. Byung-Chul Han and Bertrand Russell give the philosophy behind it.

What should I read after How to Do Nothing?

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), for attention to the living world, and Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society (2010), for why we keep ourselves so busy.

What should I read after Saving Time?

Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks (2021), which takes on the same fantasy of controlling time, and Bertrand Russell’s essay “In Praise of Idleness” (1935), which proposed a four-hour working day.

Is Jenny Odell like Cal Newport?

They give some of the same advice, but for different reasons. Newport wants your attention back so that you can do better work; Odell questions the idea that attention should be measured by what it produces at all.

Does Jenny Odell have a new book?

No new book has been announced as of October 2026. Her most recent is Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (2023).

Which Jenny Odell book should I read first?

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) is the place to start. Saving Time (2023) is longer and builds on it.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Jenny Odell

10 authors like Jenny Odell

Rebecca Solnit

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Oliver Burkeman

Henry David Thoreau

Bertrand Russell

Annie Dillard

Byung-Chul Han

Sherry Turkle

Tricia Hersey

Cal Newport

Where to start if you loved Jenny Odell

Frequently asked questions about authors like Jenny Odell

Who writes like Jenny Odell?

What should I read after How to Do Nothing?

What should I read after Saving Time?

Is Jenny Odell like Cal Newport?

Does Jenny Odell have a new book?

Which Jenny Odell book should I read first?

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