Marie Kondo's Book Fetish

(It's truly bizarre)

Though Marie Kondo’s best-selling book about de-cluttering came out almost a decade ago, I still see her praised in newspaper columns and on line. Her advice to cull your books by only keeping the ones that "bring you joy" reveals that she doesn't understand all the different meanings that books can have for their owners.

Kondo maintains that “books are essentially paper – sheets of paper printed with letters and bound together. Their true purpose is to be read, to convey the information to their readers. It’s the information they contain that has meaning. There is no meaning in them just being on your shelves.”

It’s hard to imagine a more mechanistic, unfeeling approach to reading and owning books. Add to that her advice to just tear out a page that has particular meaning for you and then pitch the rest of the book. Seriously? This is a plan? This makes sense? That's not de-cluttering, that's vandalism.

I think that my European-educated mother, who read in many languages, would have called Kondo “a vulgarian.”

Psychologist James Hillman wrote in The Force of Character that “A book is built on ideas” and that the “capacity to entertain ideas and find pleasure in this entertainment has long been a justification for writing and reading books, and holding on to them as valuable property.”

I've kept books that I read years ago in college not just because I might re-read them, but because they remind me of classes, teachers, and even fellow students.  They're part of my history.  Some of them even helped inspire me to become a writer—or were purchased on a significant date I wouldn’t remember without a note inside the book.

Other books relate to my professional life. I have a whole book case of review copies of books I reviewed for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post, and other newspapers as well as on various public radio shows. These are my favorites and I might re-read some. I might not. What matters is that those seven packed shelves, carefully alphabetized by author, are a window opening to my life as a reviewer.  They remind me of the editors I worked with, the deadlines I met, and the way I learned to write and revise with tight deadlines.

Then there are the books in my den which track my reading interests over the years: The Tudors, Shakespeare, Ancient Rome, The Russian Revolution. Few of them spark joy (which seems like a bizarrely high standard), but they leave me with a sense of contentment, and there's always a chance I might re-read one or more than I already have. They're certainly useful resources if I need them for some project.  They, too, are part of my history. 

Likewise, as a writer of memoir, I'm not planning on emptying my revolving bookcase of memoirs because I may want to consult them at some point, and many of them inspired me in my own memoir writing. Their presence is encouraging, supportive, invaluable. And I’ve often used excerpts from quite a few of those books when teaching a memoir class or workshop.

The several thousand books in the study where I do my writing and editing are more varied and go deeper: biographies; Judaica; drama; poetry; American fiction, British, French, German, and Russian fiction; books about France and the French language; Psychology; The Gilded Age.  And then there are a dozen shelves of books by and about Henry James and Edith Wharton, two of my favorite authors.

I also have multiple copies of a number of novels because I wrote notes in my books and when I want to re-read one that's heavily annotated, I start over.  Likewise, there are books that contain notes I made about a book or story I was working on while reading them.  Get rid of them?  Why?

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery.  He’s taught creative writing at Michigan State University and currently offers creative writing workshops as well as editing, coaching and mentoring for writers at writewithoutborders.com.

(Photo by image 2466146 from Pixabay)