The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie KondoTranslated by Cathy HiranoTen Speed Press, 2014

This book (which was originally published in Japan in 2011) came out in the US in 2014, and I’ve been meaning to read it since then—prompted partly by this NY Times piece, and then by friends who read it before I did. The main idea of the book appears on the first page: the idea is to “Start by discarding. Then organize your space, thoroughly, completely, in one go.” This may be more practical for some people/spaces than others: I live in a one-bedroom apartment and this approach seems reasonable to me, but if I lived in a big house, maybe it’d seem overwhelming.

Kondo’s other main points are 1) the idea that you should deal with your stuff by category, not by place (e.g. don’t clean out your closet: deal with all your clothes at once, or at least all your tops at once, all your bottoms at once, etc.) and 2) the idea that you should take each thing in your hand and decide if it sparks joy, keeping it if the answer is yes, and getting rid of it if the answer is no. She argues against sorting through/discarding things little by little, saying that it’s hard to stay motivated that way because you don’t see immediate results, and she also argues that asking yourself if each thing sparks joy is a way to get better at knowing/recognizing what you like, and a way to get better at making decisions, both of which can then have positive ramifications in your life as a whole.

There’s a lot of stuff in this book that I like, enough that I’m happy just ignoring the bits that don’t resonate with me (like the exhortations not to wear sweatpants, if you’re a woman, and the weird weight-loss encouragements at the book’s end). I like that Kondo’s ultimate goal is happiness: “The whole point in both discarding and keeping things,” she says, “is to be happy” (38). She has a specific order for sorting things (clothes, books, papers, miscellany, mementos), which roughly makes sense to me (the idea is to do the easiest categories first, so you get better as you go and are used to the process by the time you get to the hard stuff), even if I don’t actually have interest in using her method on my books. (She says if you haven’t read a book you own by now, you’re not going to. Not true!) I think I’m most interested in trying her method on clothes: I realized when my boyfriend and I moved into our current apartment that the amount of clothing I found useful/appropriate to have when doing laundry meant having to go to the laundromat is different from the amount of clothing I find useful/appropriate to have when I can do laundry without going outside, but I haven’t actually pruned my wardrobe accordingly. Now, maybe I will.