{"id":2906,"date":"2016-03-15T07:00:10","date_gmt":"2016-03-15T14:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/?p=2906"},"modified":"2016-03-14T16:33:39","modified_gmt":"2016-03-14T23:33:39","slug":"the-marie-kondo-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2016\/03\/the-marie-kondo-post\/","title":{"rendered":"The Marie Kondo post"},"content":{"rendered":"

Live Talks Los Angeles<\/a>\u00a0is one of the few organizations whose mails I am subscribed to, and with good reason. They conduct talks and interviews with interesting people \u2014 their site has a huge archive of older events that are well-worth checking out. While I have not\u00a0attended too many of their events, the one with Neil Gaiman being the only one from recent times, I love watching their videos \u2014\u00a0Moby interviewing Shepard Fairey<\/a> was a recent highlight. Their emails tell me about new books that I should be looking out for, like Terry Gilliam’s autobiography from last year, and both Nigella and Madhur Jaffrey’s recent cook-books (yes, I keep track of cookbooks, sue me). Padma Lakshmi is in town on Tuesday talking about her memoir, and I am very tempted to go.<\/p>\n

In one of these emails, I found mention of\u00a0Marie Kondo, a lady who has made a career of the art of tidying. Her book\u00a0The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up\u00a0<\/em>has literally changed lives, and she is promoting her\u00a0new book\u00a0Spark Joy<\/em>. She was one of Time Magazine’s 100 Influential People from 2015, her surname has nearly become a verb (to do a ‘Kondo’), and the strength of her clean-up strategy apparently led to record number of donations and consignments in the US\u00a0last year, with people giving away piles and piles of belongings that do not meet the KonMari cleaning criteria. In a consumerist culture, she says, we should only own things that ‘spark joy’.<\/p>\n

\"kondo-book_0\"<\/p>\n

The eyebrow-raised, skeptical version of myself\u00a0backed\u00a0away slowly from what walked, talked and sounded\u00a0like another\u00a0brainless minimalism fad that sweeps through the country \u2014\u00a0actually, the world, considering that Ms. Kondo has been translated into 13 languages. But I flipped\u00a0through her first book\u00a0at a Barnes and Noble. Surprisingly,\u00a0what I read\u00a0made a lot of\u00a0sense.\u00a0I ended up finishing\u00a0all of it the next day, and my\u00a0skepticism, I will admit, has been replaced by respect. While there are moments when the book’s instructions\u00a0border on the ridiculous (“thank your dress and bag at the end of the day” or “hug your clothes to show your appreciation”), the majority of what she says is sane, practical and helpful. Her tone is gentle, and her approach to cleaning an iterative process that\u00a0she has\u00a0honed over the years; she takes\u00a0readers through what did not work, arriving at her conclusions with clear-headed logic and a self-deprecating demeanor that is endearing.<\/p>\n

The reason the KonMari method makes sense to me is a function of my personality. You, familiar reader, should be aware of my propensity to indulge in ridiculous consumerism in the name of bibliophilia \u2014 in plain words, I buy too many books. Over the years, that has led to a proliferation of bookshelves and a read-queue that is pure Sparta. In the Frank Miller sense of the term, not the ancient Greek sense, thanks.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that I am unaware of my failings: my book-buying is no longer as undisciplined as it once was, and I am not shy when it comes to getting rid of books that do not fit my tastes anymore. But there is something deeper at play \u2014 this excuse that I, and others, give ourselves; that buying and hoarding books is somewhat nobler than buying clothes, or shoes, or any other form of consumerist activity that results in clogged closets and empty wallets. Really, bibliomania \u2014 which makes more sense than the gentler ‘philia’ \u2014 is an equally irksome addiction that is somehow bolstered by the reactions of well-meaning people around me. My favorite part of Kondo’s book was her mince-no-words approach to talking about books in one’s possession.<\/p>\n

The most common reason for not discarding a book is \u201cI might read it again.\u201d Take a moment to count the number of favorite books that you have actually read more than once. How many are there? For some it may be as few as five while for some exceptional readers it may be as many as one hundred. People who reread that many, however, are usually people in specific professions, such as scholars and authors. Very rarely will you find ordinary people like me who read so many books. Let\u2019s face it. In the end, you are going to read very few of your books again. As with clothing, we need to stop and think about what purpose these books serve. Books are essentially paper\u2014sheets of paper printed with letters and bound together. Their true purpose is to be read, to convey the information to their readers. It\u2019s the information they contain that has meaning. There is no meaning in their just being on your shelves. You read books for the experience of reading. Books you have read have already been experienced and their content is inside you, even if you don\u2019t remember. So when deciding which books to keep, forget about whether you think you\u2019ll read it again or whether you\u2019ve mastered what\u2019s inside. Instead, take each book in your hand and decide whether it moves you or not. Keep only those books that will make you happy just to see them on your shelves, the ones that you really love. That includes this book, too. If you don\u2019t feel any joy when you hold it in your hand, I would rather you discard it. What about books that you have started but not yet finished reading? Or books you bought but have not yet started? What should be done with books like these that you intend to read sometime? The Internet has made it easy to purchase books, but as a consequence, it seems to me that people have far more unread books than they once did, ranging from three to more than forty. It is not uncommon for people to purchase a book and then buy another one not long after, before they have read the first one. Unread books accumulate. The problem with books that we intend to read sometime is that they are far harder to part with than ones we have already read.<\/p>\n

If you missed your chance to read a particular book, even if it was recommended to you or is one you have been intending to read for ages, this is your chance to let it go. You may have wanted to read it when you bought it, but if you haven\u2019t read it by now, the book\u2019s purpose was to teach you that you didn\u2019t need it. There\u2019s no need to finish reading books that you only got halfway through. Their purpose was to be read halfway. So get rid of all those unread books. It will be far better for you to read the book that really grabs you right now than one that you left to gather dust for years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I am not saying that Marie Kondo changed something fundamental in me. Hey,\u00a0I finished reading Life Changing\u00a0<\/em>last week, and have since bought 3\u00a0books \u2014\u00a0to clarify, lest you think I am a complete idiot, they were used and 50% off, they were parts of series that I am in the middle of, and over the weekend, to make up for it,\u00a0I donated a crate of books and few bags\u00a0of non-book stuff. The point though is that the KonMari method looks to me a viable way of approaching my priorities when it comes to buying and owning things – not just books. There are small tactics to tidying up that I began using almost immediately, and I will talk about them in a separate post. Ultimately,\u00a0what Kondo recommends is\u00a0no half measures<\/a>, and for that I need time – maybe a full weekend, maybe more. The struggle is real, people! Watch this space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Live Talks Los Angeles\u00a0is one of the few organizations whose mails I am subscribed to, and with good reason. They conduct talks and interviews with interesting people \u2014 their site has a huge archive of older events that are well-worth checking out. While I have not\u00a0attended too many of their events, the one with Neil […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,5],"tags":[628,629,630,626,627],"class_list":["post-2906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-myself","tag-bibliomania","tag-konmari-method","tag-lifehacks","tag-marie-kondo","tag-tidying-up"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2906"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2910,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2906\/revisions\/2910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}