I think this is the first time I’ve actually hate-read something. I don’t know how else to explain why I actually finished this book. Either that or I was just hoping that eventually it would get good – although I am not generally the type to stick it out in a book I don’t like, so that would be unusual for me. Hence my hate-read conclusion.

Some of this is related to the book itself. Discovery of LESS is essentially a memoir of how Chris Lovett figured out that cramming your space full of stuff actually makes your life worse and getting rid of the stuff you don’t like and don’t use is a good thing. Not an unreasonable premise – actually, it’s a premise I was quite excited to read, because I generally enjoy books about people’s relationship with objects. But because it’s a memoir, what I think about this book is inextricably tied to what I think about the author. And I do not like this author very much.

Generally I try to avoid attacking the author in my reviews. I know that people have different opinions, every writer has to start somewhere, and even good authors can have a book that flops. But I have to ascribe some of the blame for this book to the author, because he portrays himself as just an utter ass.

Chris writes about his past clutter-having self with a perverse kind of glee at his own idiocy. I hope that he’s exaggerating some of the descriptions of extreme clutter for effect, but either way, he makes himself out in this book as a thundering blockhead who couldn’t seem to comprehend that he could just get rid of things that were broken or that he didn’t like. The process of getting rid of things could have been humbling or enlightening, but for the caricature masquerading as the author in this story, it was self-aggrandizing. As written, he wasn’t really recognizing that stuff didn’t solve his problems or reckoning with whatever drove him to compulsively purchase or even revising his relationship with objects – he was the person to discover this path to true happiness and that made him the savior of people with too much stuff in their homes. After spending six months traveling the world to truly master his new technique, the first thing he did upon returning was semi-forcibly convert his reluctant parents to his new Gospel of Owning LESS.

Everything in this book comes off as incredibly self-centered. Chris has a girlfriend who lives with him and goes on this minimalism journey with him, but though she’s mentioned here and there, we never get any impression of what she thought of his new determination not to own things, or why she decided to do it herself, or even whether she was minimizing her possessions voluntarily or felt pressured to do so by her boyfriend’s all-consuming new mission. Not only does it not feel like Chris was involving his long-term partner in any decisions about this huge lifestyle change, she only barely passes the “there’s textual evidence that people besides the protagonist can see her” test. The focus is all on Chris, including absolutely ridiculous and unnecessary digressions into things like why he thinks it’s a fashion faux pas to wear two scarves to meet up with someone for a mid-day beer. (The whole meeting could have been reduced to a sentence or two with no loss to the overall narrative.) The insistence on including every detail about what he thought and felt and did, practically to the point of boredom, combined with the utter lack of insight or even real conversation with anyone else, made him come off as unbelievably selfish, self-important, and self-centered.

I have a really hard time believing that people heard his story and told him he should write a book, because I’m reading his story and all I can think is, “Dude, shut the hell up.” Chris may believe strongly in less possessions, but he certainly doesn’t believe in less words.

I really wanted this to be something useful or at least enjoyable, but this book is neither. The author comes off like a self-righteous ass, and the narrative is bogged down in so many unimportant digressions made essential by the fact that Chris thought of them that even the potentially interesting parts become aggressively unrelatable. I kept waiting for something to happen that would make this book more than “guy discovers less stuff is nice and becomes minimalism evangelist,” but it did not. I don’t want to say that I don’t like Chris Lovett himself, because I haven’t met him in real life and likely never will. But I definitely do not like the likely-somewhat-fictionalized version of himself portrayed in this book.