Today Arianna Huffington announced that her first pick for the HuffPost Book Club is In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed by our very own Carl Honoré!

So how does a book about slowing down relate to the rapid-fire, fast-paced nature of the Huffington Post? Honoré writes, “speed can be fun, productive, and powerful, and we would be poorer without it. What the world needs, and what the slow movement offers, is a middle path, a recipe for marrying la dolce vita with they dynamism of the information age. The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes in between.”

And there possibly couldn’t be a better time to read this book and learn from Honoré’s message. We live in an age of speed, work faster, eat faster, read faster, and it’s causing us to burn out personally, culturally, economically. Carl explains that the current recession is a prime example of how our economy, based on fast growth, fast profits, cannot be sustained.

Slowing down will make us happier, healthier, and more productive. So, read the book and discuss here, let us know how you’ve benefitted from slowing down. Then invite Carl to speak to your community!

Carl Honoré is a best-selling author and journalist based in London. Since 1991, he has written from all over Europe and South America, spending three years in Buenos Aires along the way. His work has appeared in publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Economist, Observer, National Post, Globe and Mail, Houston Chronicle, and the Miami Herald. He is best known for his advocacy of the Slow Movement. A loose and international effort by the harried and haggard to decelerate the pace of their lives, the Slow Movement spans everything from telecommunications (slow email) and health care (slow medicine) to diet (slow food) and public space (slow cities). In addition to In Praise of Slowness, Carl is also the author of Under Pressure: How the Epidemic of Hyper-Parenting is Endangering Childhood.