Lessons Learned While Staying Put by Annie B. Jones
Nonfiction/Memoir
2025
Finished on October 27, 2026
Rating: 3/5 (Good)
Publisher's Blurb:
Can life be an adventure, even when it’s just… ordinary?
Annie Jones always assumed adulthood would mean adventure: a high-powered career; life in a big, bustling city; and travels to far-flung places she’d longed to see. But her reality turned out differently. As the years passed, Annie was still in the same small town running an independent bookstore —the kind of life Nora Ephron dreamed.
During that time, she hosted friends’ goodbye parties and mailed parting gifts; wrote recommendation letters and wished former shop staffers well. She stayed in her small town, despite her love of big cities; stayed in her marriage to the guy she met when she was 18; and she stayed at her bookstore while the world outside shifted steadily toward digital retailers. And she stayed loyal to a faith she sometimes didn’t recognize.
After ten years, Annie realized she might never leave. But instead of regret, she had an epiphany. She awakened to the gifts of a quiet life spent staying put.
In Ordinary Time, Annie challenges the idea that loud lives matter most. Rummaging through her small-town existence, she finds hidden gifts of humor and hope from a life lived quietly. Staying, can itself be a radical act. It takes courage to stay in the places we’ve always called home, Jones argues, as she paints a portrait of possibility far away from thriving metropolises and Monica Gellar-inspired apartments.
We’ve long been encouraged to follow our dreams, to pack up and move to new places and leave old lives—and past selves—behind. While there is beauty in these kinds of adventures, Ordinary Time helps us see ourselves right where we are: in the middle of messy, mundane lives, maybe not too far from where we grew up. We don’t have to leave to find what we yearn—we can choose to stay, celebrating and honoring our ordinary lives, which might turn out to be bigger and better than we ever imagined.
I'm not a listener of podcasts, although I've tried a few out here and there over the years. The majority of those were book-related, and I found them enjoyable, but never seemed to find the time to listen. Audiobooks take priority when I'm in a situation where I want to listen to something on my walks or while running errands. This is to say that I've never listened to Annie Jone's podcast, From the Front Porch. I'm not sure when I learned about her memoir, Ordinary Time, but if I had to guess, it was from another blogger, perhaps during last year's Nonfiction November challenge.
Speaking of Nonfiction November, I got a jump start on this annual reading challenge while on our recent road trip. I especially enjoy memoirs and knew they'd be the sort of reading material that I could dip in and out of while enjoying our travels. Comprised of five sections (Staying Friends, Staying Put, Staying Faithful, Staying Grounded, and Staying You), each of which is led with an appropriate quote, Ordinary Time is exactly the sort of memoir that can be read in fits & spurts. Reading the following made me think that this book was really going to speak to me:
Everybody has a home team: It's the people you call when you get a flat tire or when something terrible happens. It's the people who, near or far, know everything that's wrong with you and love you anyways. These are the ones who tell you their secrets, who get themselves a glass of water without asking when they're at your house. These are the people who cry when you cry. These are your people, your middle-of-the-night, no-matter-what people. (Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine)
And yet, Ordinary Time fell short of my initial expectations. Several of the essays were repetitive, and the topic of the author's religious upbringing and current worship was more than I cared for. I did, however, appreciate her thoughts on the loss of bookstore customers, which sparked a lot of memories of those I came to know over the course of a decade while working at Barnes & Noble. I left the bookstore almost ten years ago, and yet I can still picture several of the "regulars" who frequented the store, many of whom sought me out for recommendations, as well as providing me with their own favorites. I wonder how they're doing today? Are they still alive? Do they quietly follow this blog? I guess I'll never know, which is a little sad.
If I am lucky and own The Bookshelf long enough, I will live through the deaths of countless Als and Paulas and Roses. And although I know such an outcome would be a privilege, the prospect makes me sad. It feels lonely, to keep loving people you don't really know, and depressing, to be forced to learn about their deaths through an internet search. I always believed my relationships would be deeper than this.
How naive, because the relationships that make life worth living are often the fleeting ones, the seasonal ones, the acquaintanceships we can't ever seem to define.
Overall, Ordinary Time is a fine read, but could have benefitted from more careful editing to deal with the overlap between essays.
