Review: Ordinary Time
Ordinary Time: Lessons Learned While Staying Put
Annie B. Jones
HarperOne, April 22, 2025
I don’t often like books of essays because I read them too fast. Essays that were originally published months or years apart turn out to be repetitive when collected. Little quirks that seemed charmingly idiosyncratic in a single essay crop up every ten pages in a book. The rhythm, style, pattern, and jokes pile up until I’m skimming instead of reading. I felt that same sensation of over familiarity while reading Ordinary Time by Annie B. Jones, and yet I stayed. Given that Jones wrote this book for the stayers rather than the leavers, the people who stick around in their hometowns and thrive rather than striking off for the stereotypical big city life, it seems only right that I read through to the end, to my own surprise, and enjoyed it.
I did not stay, myself. At age eighteen, and with the full support of my family, I left for university in a town more than a thousand miles from my tiny hometown. Coincidentally, the university I attended for undergrad is the same university in Jones’s hometown, which she did not attend. I think I’m probably at least a decade older than Jones, so we didn’t cross paths. And the university is absolutely massive, so the chances of our crossing paths would have been low. And in any case, I left that town too.
Jones made every effort to stay. She got married and worked at a bookshop inside a cupcake store (a dream, really). She and her partner embarked on their adult life together and made their adult friends—who were all working on advanced degrees. When those degrees were granted, they left.
The concept of an adult life still sometimes eludes me, and Mr. HG and I did bounce around a bit after university. But then, twenty years ago, we bought a house in a neighborhood that feels like a small town. And I’ve stayed. This realization, that I’ve stayed and have close friends and a wider community here, is what intrigued me about Ordinary Time. For so long, I wasn’t a stayer, but now I am. What does it mean to stay?
The owners of the popup bookshop where Jones worked closed that shop and offered her the chance of a bookworm’s lifetime: ownership of their “flagship” store in a small town about an hour north. Despite not yet being thirty years old, she said yes.
She acknowledges that being the new people in a small town is a lifelong status. She also details the deep connections that she’s made with customers and staff through the magic of running a bookshop. I picked this book up on a lark and had no idea Jones has extended her community outside her small Southern town with her podcast From the Front Porch. Savvier readers will surely know this going in.
Jones thoughtfully discusses the challenges of finding a new church and of leaving that new church when you realize it does not jibe with your values. This is wildly outside my experience, but I also feel like there is little mention in contemporary literature of low-key liberal or even leftist Christianity. When is the last time you read of someone in a book wanting to go to church? Or wrestling with their faith without giving up on the entire enterprise? It felt old-fashioned and fresh at the same time, which was my experience of the entire book.
I think for the right reader, this book is a balm. Jones is right—there are far more books about lighting off for the big city than about finding a happy life where you are. People can say “bloom where you’re planted” all they want, but American books and movies in particular have been telling us for decades that happiness lies elsewhere. Jones knows her audience, and she writes directly to them. I’m just a bit to the side of her audience, appreciative but not quite all the way in.
Jones’s writing is compelling, which is how I ended up plowing through this over a wet winter weekend. I’ll leave you with one of her best sentences, one that applies whether you stay or leave:
Love what you love, and let other people see it, so they can love it, too.
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