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reviewed The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo (The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, #1)

Marie Kondo: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Hardcover, 2014, Ten Speed Press) 3 stars

Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes …

Review of 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

This woman clearly has OCD. She manically cleaned every wire in a metal shower rack, and worked herself into tears over a slimy shampoo bottle. She's "sworn off" her addiction to storage solutions, insisting you should organize everything into shoeboxes instead. I think a lot of this book is her journey reconciling her tidying obsession with her yearning for tranquility.

Her subjective guidelines of what to trash and how much of something to keep are useful: there is no magic number of socks that's best for every person. Her insistence that you should get rid of momentous because if it was really that great, you wouldn't need something to remember it by is stupid, and I wish she'd spent more time thinking that part through: I've found that photos and trinkets I didn't care for in childhood spark joy in me now.

My takeaways from this book are: 1) get rid of things you don't use and don't make you happy, 2) give every item its own place in your home and make it easy to return it to it there.