(I don’t know how I could fully describe my love for this book—but I will surely have fun trying!)
The Art of Frugal Hedonism:
A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More by Annie Raser-Rowland and Adam Grubb (2016), 231pp., Melliodora Publishing
This is not one of those worthy
books sharing 1000+ Ways to Save on Everything.
This book is basically just listening to friends talk about
how wonderful life is, ESPECIALLY for those opting out of the hyper-consumerism of the modern era. It wil make you happy just to see things through the authors' eyes.
“The Frugal Hedonist expects that life will be a multi-coloured journey of pleasures and struggles and joy and death and adventure and boredom and epiphany and love and loss and getting drenched in storms and dry by fires and sometimes eating slightly stale bread but not minding and sometimes eating freshly plucked raspberries and being jubilant.”
(from p. 171)
This is what the whole book sounds like. This is why I love it. Also I love it because--
The 51 very short chapters have wonderful names like:
• Find Free ‘Third’ Places
• Revel in the Good Brain Chemistry of Resourcefulness
• Don’t be a Selfish %$*#
• Have a Fine Ol’ Peasant Time
After each title, then follows a joyful discussion of how great it is to do things the old-fashioned, frugal, human, humane way, based upon that particular theme,
led by two people who really enjoy living and thinking this way and letting you in on their open secrets.
Besides the very short chapters (some are only a paragraph in length!) there is a fun and funny annotated Further Resources section that will point you in so many right directions.
The words are of
course wonderful, but also the many illustrations (in various media) make you laugh a lot and think at the same time. I love them. Sadly it violates copyrights if I quote the entire book for you like I want to, so you will have to get it from your library. (I have read it cover-to-cover three times now upon loan from my library!)
3
