Review: All You Need is Less

All You Need Is Less: The Eco-friendly Guide to Guilt-Free Green Living and Stress-Free Simplicity
by Madeleine Somerville

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book reads like a blog--a very funny blog. The author is a Canadian woman with a husband and a baby and a big dog who is trying to live as "green" as she can and to share her hippie wisdom with the rest of us. There are a lot of useful tips in this book and a lot of self-help-book-type sections where she assures us that our efforts are good and we shouldn't feel guilty (mostly, there are a few things about which she is very clear that we should feel guilty, like clay kitty litter.) Overall this is a funny and useful book that provides the reader with a lot of practical steps they can take, in their actual lives, to help the planet.

Here are the things I am going to do based on this book:

• use cloths on my Swiffer instead of disposable sheets (someone was going to knit me a swiffer cover ages ago, but I think she forgot)
• stop using dryer sheets -- I always thought they were a waste, now I know they are also gross
• try her magic silver cleaning solution (aluminum foil and baking soda)
• look into whether I need microfiber cloths (I'm pretty on-board with not buying stuff already, so am not sure about this as I have lots of old T shirts around already)

This book counts toward the 8th Canadian Book Challenge.