Konmari Problems: Books

If you are friends with me on Facebook, you’ve no doubt seen me talking about The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up aka the Konmari method.

Much of what I typed was just me being silly. It’s a little overwhelming but very interesting and much of it makes sense. My real problem though is her method of managing books. I don’t think she understands my relationship with books.

From the beginning of her section on books…

We have to take all of the books off of the shelf and put them on the floor. I understand her suggestion to do this, in general. It makes a lot of sense to see your collections of items as one big THING. It also makes sense to touch each item to determine which bring you joy.

Since I already know I have an ass ton of books, shouldn’t I be able to just pick up each book from the shelf, hold it and then either return it or discard it? Do I really have to move thousands of books into one room in order to determine joy? I think not.

Also, since TW and I co-own these books, how do we decide together which books bring joy. If one brings me joy, but doesn’t bring TW joy, does my joy outweigh hers?

She also talks a lot about imagining A bookshelf filled with books you love.

I, however, picture a good half dozen bookshelves filled with books I love.

Also, she does not understand that my books are arranged by color. Therefore dozens of bookshelves of books sorted by color DO make me happy. Those books DO have value just by being on the shelf. They are beautiful. They do serve a purpose by just being there. Books are not only valuable for the information they provide to you when you read them. Or even by the pleasure you get from reading them. They bring me pleasure simply by BEING there.

I suspect she doesn’t understand this. Or, I wonder if she’d tell me that my books are not in fact books, they are komono or sentimental items so they should be managed differently. Maybe?

One last problem is that I’m not sure I buy into the idea that “sometime means never” as in “I might read that sometime.” I do sometimes read the books from my stacks, though she is right — I rarely re-read books.

I also don’t think I buy into the idea that the perfect time to read a book is when it first comes to you and if you don’t read it at that moment, then you’ve missed your opportunity and you should simply let that book go. I’ve read books from my stacks years after I first acquired them and I’ve fully enjoyed reading them.

I’m not giving up, I’m definitely going to give this a try — even if I have to do some sort of modified version of Konmari. Totally fascinating.