How do I get into messes like this? Reading books that have words like "tidying" in their title, I mean. Well, there's a story behind it.The Good Wife and I are trying to purge, to clean up after decades of marriage, kids, three moves, etc. "We've got to do something about all this stuff we keep bumping into or dusting," I keep saying, "something more than the penny ante efforts we're doing so far."Enter a New York Times feature on THIS book, calling it the greatest thing since sliced sushi:http...

"You will never use spare buttons." WORDS WE ALL NEED TO HEAR.I really thoroughly loved this book. I've always been interested in minimalism - trying to stop material goods being the things that bring us happiness, and not owning more than we need - and picked this book up after hearing a few people around me enjoy it. I was hoping it would give me a few tips on how to lead a more clutter-free existence, and while it accomplished that, it also did so much more. The thing that most stuck me about...

Do you like talking to furniture? Do you believe shirts have souls? Are you insane? This might be the book for you.

This book did not spark joy. Therefore, I am discarding it.

There is no rating low enough to compensate for the way this book has ruined my life. Whatever you do, don't read it as it will haunt you. This is a long review but it behooves you to stick with it. To begin, you have to touch each and every possession and ask yourself if it brings you joy. If it doesn't, it needs to be discarded. Do you know how hard it is to summon joy for beige underwear or Neosporin? Yet summon you must. I like my carrot peeler but is joy too strong a word? It gets tougher.

The book is short and sweet, and the author is bat-shit crazy. But. Here are two take-aways that will stay with me:If it does not spark joy, throw it out.And: "My basic principle for sorting papers is to throw them all away."Believe me - I have been throwing away (and selling, and donating to Goodwill) with a vengeance for the past few days, and tidying. I refuse to fold my socks though. Folding socks is for people with all the time in the world.

I laughed out loud four times reading this book. Otherwise, it's the ravings of a lunatic. Funniest moments include the author bursting into tears when she discovers a smudge of bathroom slime on the bottom of her shampoo bottle and that she believes if you have 80 rolls of toilet paper in your house, you are a hoarder instead of a Coscto member. This is a woman who has her entire bookshelf in her clothes closet; if I walk into your house and you do not have 200 books laying around that you have...

I have just experienced the life-changing magic of discarding two-thirds of my clothes, shoes, and accessories! One category down, a whole house to go. It's so fun to get dressed now; all I have to do is reach in and anything I pull out "sparks joy" in my heart. After going up three sizes and then back down again within the last 2 years, you'd think I wouldn't have anything left to discard, but that wasn't true. So many items were hiding the good stuff, dragging me down with bad memories, worn o...

"Personally, I recommend hanging sponges outside, such as on the veranda."Quite possibly the funniest line I have ever read in a book. Because she is dead serious.Although there were several helpful sections about how to declutter and organize your home, much of this book is ridiculously funny. This woman obviously has no children (and no life) as she speaks to all her inanimate objects daily, empties her purse EVERY SINGLE DAY, and doesn't own a dish rack, preferring instead to put all her dish...

This book just spoke to me, for whatever reason, although I can see why others might not get much out of it. No matter what the subject is, I love reading books by people that are truly passionate about the subject matter, and one thing is for sure: Marie Kondo is passionate about tidying. Despite all of that, this book isn't really about tidying, at its core. It's about living very intentionally and allowing your surroundings and possessions to become an expression of yourself. If that last sen...

Looking for a new book but don't want to commit? Check out my latest BooktTube Video: One & Done - all about fabulous standalones! Now that you know this one made the list - check out the video to see the rest! The Written Review : The question of what you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life. By no exaggeration, Marie Kondō has spent her entire life tidying.She tidied when she was a child up until her adulthood - and over those decades, she'

This review was delayed because I was busy tidying up. Yesterday I finished this charming little book about the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing, and this morning I woke up filled with ENTHUSIASM and was ready to open up every drawer and every closet and to simplify, simplify, simplify. Of course, such projects always take longer than you expect. I was trying to follow the spirit of Marie Kondo's guidelines, which involve handling each one of your possessions and asking: Does this spa...

"Be careful whose advice you buy but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth." --Mary Schmich. I'm trying, Mary. I really am. Oh, screw it. This was the most stressful book I've ever read. I haven't been thrown into such a fucking frenzy of hatred since The Book Thief, and as with The Book Thief, I'm astounded that audienc...

I so agree that it is life-changing magic when everything has been tidied up. But I don't need to read the book as I already have this magic. Her name is Cynthia and she comes every other Thursday morning. Admittedly she costs a "bit" more than this book and wants a computer lesson during her time but she Fabuloso's my floors, the airing cupboard is stacked with neatly-folded linens and once in a while we go at a place (like my son's room) that lacks 'magic' and garbage-bag everything. This is a...

Because I have such admiration for the Japanese aesthetic, I picked up this book with interest. In fact, I was delighted to discover that my lifetime habits of tidying are roughly in line with Marie Kondo's, the expert's, except for a brilliant bit of advice relative to clothes that I can't wait to try. Kondo's basic mantra is "keep things that bring you joy; discard everything else," and that is so cool that I'm going to try it, because it goes further than what I had thought, but along the sam...

I think the word "tidy" or "tidying" was used in the book at least a 100 times, and that's being conservative. Talk about some clutter...Anyway, I definitely didn't enjoy this as much as I thought I would. And I certainly didn't enjoy this as much as The Joy of Less. Maybe it was the fact that I had read that book prior to this or the fact that I have been reading a lot of minimalist blogs and sites that already extrapolated the best parts of this book and the KonMari Method...but I just found m...

Edit: Apparently thntn is very upset and thinks it’s racist of this white woman not to like this book (I like Kondo as a person just fine) because the author isn’t white. Well, that’s bullshit, obviously. If thntn doesn’t like a book by an author that is of a different race than her’s... I guess that makes thntn a racist herself. It appears that I have to make a correction. I’m told that Ms. Kondo never said to get rid of hangers. I apologize. It must have been the word ‘tidy’ echoing in my brai...

I give this one 2 stars because I took a few things from it that I think are great ideas to help me organize. But about a third of the book was spent repeating itself and when it wasn't doing that...it was just weird to me. I wondered at times if the book was satire or a memoir of OCD disguised as the middle child syndrome. Some examples that had me wondering if this was satire or not include:1) She talked as though inanimate objects have feelings or as though they are alive so you have to say g...

I may not use every piece of advice in this book, but I did really enjoy it, and will be incorporating parts into my life. I enjoyed listening to the audiobook while I cleaned

I hesitated to read this book because I thought it might not have much to offer beyond what's written on its back cover: get rid of any belongings that don't "spark joy." That is really the essence of Kondo's advice, but she has more to offer in the rest of the book too, and it's surprisingly eccentric and Japanese. No American book would advise praying to your house before tidying it, for example, or suggest that objects just want to help you and that, once released from your possession, they w...