The 10 Best Books for Living Home-Free
(And Those Wanting to Better Understand Those Who Do)
Thinking about living a more intentional life?
Already living simply and seeking some inspiration to continue your journey?
Know someone who lives in her RV and want to read up on the greats to understand why on Earth someone would do such a thing?
If you answered “yes” or “maybe” or “kind of I dunno quit asking me questions”, this is the reading list for you.
Disclaimer: Most literature that helps understand the reasoning behind giving up one’s house or apartment and living home-free only indirectly addresses the lifestyle. Most relevant literature discusses voluntary simplicity as a general ethos. Downsizing and minimalism are keywords (re-)emerging in our popular lexicon in a big way, but many works which address it stay within the confines of home owner- or rentership. This makes seeking more specifically focused literature a challenge.
What I’ve done here, then, is compiled a list of great books based on those variety of factors which tend to comprise the home-free ethos. The result is a range of titles covering everything from fiction to memoir, journalism to essay, spanning topics such as economic reasoning and individual freedom to non-conformity and overcoming adversity. Embarking on a life of voluntary homelessness, or living home-free, is much more than giving up one’s traditional dwelling. It means embracing one’s independent beliefs in the face of critical backlash. So no matter if you’re a veteran of the home-free lifestyle or someone just wanting to learn more about it, these 10 books (and the honorable mentions which follow) are great ways to do just that.
Okay, here we go!:
10) Nickel & Dimed: On Not Getting By in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich
“If rents are exquisitely sensitive to market forces, wages clearly are not.”
9) Dharma Bums
by Jack Kerouac
“Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that cramp they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume…”
8) Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
by Cheryl Strayed
“That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.”
7) Time Was Soft There
by Jeremy Mercer
“Nobody has the answers. I don’t like people who pretend they do. Life is just the result of a dance of molecules.”
Jeremy Mercer’s memoir about him leaving his life behind in Canada to live in Paris, inevitably finding himself living among a small group of bohemian writers in the Shakespeare & Company bookstore. If ever there was a book that resembled a story of a man living where he worked, this one is it. Mercer’s abrupt decision to lead the home-free life gives unique insight into the routines of the urban home-free, from finding low-cost meals to redefining the meaning of leisure time. The milieu of Shakespeare & Co. characters are equally colorful, representing a broad range of folks who end up living in odd-spaces–and a bookstore is among the oddest of all.
6) Life of Pi
by Yann Martel
“You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.”
5) Into the Wild
by Jon Krakauer
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“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.”
4) Self-Reliance
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I must be myself. I will not hide my tastes or aversions.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of those timeless thinkers, his name forever emblazoned on the Hall of Fame of free thinkers of our time. His essay Self-Reliance is an often quoted look into the philosophy of individuality and the ways of the non-conformist. Emerson champions every individual as having his own genius, even if that genius goes unrecognized by his peers, and urging people to express themselves as they please regardless of public opinion. Perhaps my favorite, though, is his belief of taking time to one’s self to reflect, and how community–though important in and of itself–is at times an impediment to that reflection.
3) The Man Who Quit Money
by Mark Sundeen
“The people who had the least were the most willing to share. He outlined a dictum that he would believe the rest of his life: the more people have, the less the give. Similarly, generous cultures produce less waste because excess is shared, whereas stingy nations fill their landfills with leftovers.”
Perhaps no one embodies the spirit of home-free more than Daniel Suelo, the subject of Mark Sundeen’s The Man Who Quit Money. Sundeen’s book sputters at first, then gains steam as it soars through the countless starts and stops in the life of a man who has lived for well over a decade without spending a dime. Suelo is one of those rare men who walks the talk, wholeheartedly implementing his philosophy without a hiccup, living in the Utah wilderness just outside of Moab, foraging, bartering, and scavenging for life’s necessities. If it seems impossible to live the way Suelo does, Sundeen’s exposition does well to explain the arduous path on the way to the decision, shedding light on just how difficult it is for the healthy, intelligent, and well-adjusted among us to fully tap out of economic obligation and social expectation.
2) Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
by E.F. Schumacher
“For the modern economist is very difficult to understand. He is used to measuring the “standard of living” by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is “better off” than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.”
I always wondered why I hated taking economics back in school. After reading this, I understand why. Schumacher’s entire thesis attacks the notion of this new “science” of money and how Western culture has embraced it so strongly above all other reason. Small is Beautiful brilliantly and patiently takes aim at the failures of greed and short-sightedness plaguing capitalist societies without condemning them all together. No norm is left unchallenged in the book, leaving the open-minded reader both disappointed in his fellow man and hopeful for his limitless capability for change. Small is Beautiful is a work of downsizing genius on a major scale and ethics on an even bigger one.
1) Walden
by Henry David Thoreau
“Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have.”
This one’s a shocker, I know. Thoreau is the absolute icon of the modern voluntary simplicity movement, and though he did build himself a “home” on Walden pond, his writings lend clear support to anyone wishing to live (and sleep) outside the norm. The biggest knock on the text of Walden is its Victorian density, though through the sometimes-plodding meanderings the sympathetic reader regularly finds himself face-to-face with a line of pure brilliance, requiring frequent moments of reflection which further delay progress through the book. But there’s no need to rush through Walden anyway, as its prose has a way of leaving its reader wondering why he or she would be wanting to do anything but read anyway.
