The Moneyless Man is jam-packed with interesting and startling bits and pieces of information, and great ideas that can be adapted to less radical life-changes as well. Did you know, for instance, that ‘two thirds of all the electricity that is produced and fed into the grid is lost before it even gets to your sockets’? Or that, when it comes to climate change, ‘it’s better to burn wood than let it rot’? To me, some of the most fascinating tidbits included making your own ink and paper from mushrooms (!), or using the birch polypore fungus to sharpen a razor’s edge. This book can also boast of the most lucid explanation that I’ve ever encountered (in only a couple of pages!) of the illusory nature of money. I never quite understood the credit crisis in such simple terms.

There is, in other words, much to inspire, but also much to digest; the big picture of this book sometimes gets lost in the details, but luckily the author’s enthusiasm more than makes up for it.

Because of its structure, The Moneyless Man is a book to dip into rather than read on one go, but I do wonder slightly what exactly it’s trying to be. It’s packed with information and useful tips, but the information isn’t organised quite well enough for the book to work as a resource book. It’s a memoir of the author’s personal experiences, and many of the chapters are of a very personal nature indeed, but the book lacks a narrative arc of Free, and ends up being rather disjointed. In the course of the book, the year passes by, but there’s actually no sense of a year having passed by. Partly, of course, this might be because it’s such a quick and easy but informative read; often it feels like the more effort you put into reading, the more you’ll get out of the book, though the opposite may just as well be true.

I did like The Moneyless Man better than Free – partly because of its more radical approach, and yet more practical nature; as well as its sheer enthusiasm – but it still left me with that nagging little feeling that it might have been an even better book, if…