Book: Not Buying It, My Year Without Shopping

By: Judith Levine

Well, this title appealed to me for obvious reasons. I finished it a couple months ago but haven't logged it here because, well, it just wasn't that great. Nothing to get too excited about and hence my delay in reporting on it. In fact, the only person to whom I'd recommend it is my friend Adi, and only because the writer and her partner split their time between Brooklyn and Vermont. The writing was decent, but the book really sagged in the middle (I wound up setting it down for a couple weeks and reading something else), and on top of that, the author conducted her experiment during 2004, so the reader gets the depressing opportunity to relive that year's presidential election, which is not a plus in my opinion. My main beef with this book is that the personal account, which constitutes all the good bits, is too frequently peppered with social and political commentary on the state of the world and instead of being an insightful look at one person's experience it too often turns into a boring rant about consumerism's many evils. Blah blah blah. Like I said, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone but Adi, and even to Adi I say, have a good back-up plan to revive yourself from potential boredom.