I just read about the life-changing magic of tidying up

I just read about the life-changing magic of tidying up As someone who compulsively throws stuff out, I was thrilled to hear that the bestselling book worldwide right now is about throwing stuff out: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo. You should buy that book right now because my husband and I both loved it. I knew Id love it because I am compulsive about throwing things out. She gives me deep spiritual justification for throwing out stuff my kids look for three weeks later.  My husband loves the book because it feels entirely illogical to him that we keep things we dont use, and its a relief to have  the logic for  giving all that stuff away. See that dresser in the photo? The dresser is empty. Everything I was storing in there, I gave away.  Marie Kondo defies sentimentality. Instead of saving things because they were there for us at an important time,  we need to thank our stuff for serving us well, and then we pass it on to someone else. But if you pass it to a friend, its just junk in their house. If you give it to a thrift shop then someone will like it so much they will pay for it.  This is the type of analysis that appeals to me. Kondo also says we should only keep stuff that brings us joy. Now,  each time I ask my husband to carry some oversized thing to the garage, he says to me, Oh, does this bring you joy? That phrase reminds me to examine everything in the house and decide  to either keep it in the house because I  love it or to give it away. No halfway decisions where I just store things in the garage. I start taking  pictures of things in my house that are gone. I take pictures of emptiness. Smooth  surfaces. And  uncluttered enclaves. But just around the corner from this photo is a pile of books. Actually I have about two thousand books in the house. And they are sort of taking over, and I want to get rid of something, but for most of my twenties my only source of friendship and stability were my books, so they fall more into the love category than most stuff in my house. But I notice a pile of books publishers sent to me to review. I throw out almost every book I get, but these books caught my eye  and made it into my  Read Now pile. Only  theyve been  in the pile so long that it is slipping from important physical rendering of a to-do list into a symbolic tower of nagging and wishful thinking. Still, I cannot give up the idea of reading them. I tell myself if I read them I can box them up. So I spent the day reading my pile of books. These were the best of the bunch. The first one I read seemed like it would be full of juicy tidbits for productivity: I Know How She Does It, by Laura Vanderkam.  There were tips, but I found myself spending most of my time reading the detailed schedules of women who earn six figures and have kids.  I learned the most by paying attention to what made me angry. I didnt like that women were largely unable to figure out how many hours a week they worked because work was scattered throughout the day. Because if they dont know how much they work, how will I know how much I work? Do I work enough? I also didnt like that many women called making breakfast family time. Probably because I spend so much time with my kids and it seems that I would not, with this daily log system, get credit for spending more than most women. Its lame that Im snippy and competitive.  I liked the book for forcing me to see my lameness. Next up was A World of Work, by Ilana Gershon. Its a career guide, but I can assure you, as someone who receives every career guide published, this one is  totally different. Its about how to get jobs you didnt know existed and the writing is half suspense novel and half anthropology treatise. The chapter on the guy who fixes iPhones is a cliffhanger at every page turn. When the iPhone 5 comes out he  imports screwdrivers from China and stay up 48 hours in a row in order to be the first to figure out how to take it apart and put it together again without destroying  the  hard-to-find, before-its-on-sale model he scored from a friend. Gershon is an academic, so there are footnotes that take my breath away. For example, when the ballerina talks about ruining her feet for her career, the footnote is for Discipline and Punish by Foucault. The best books make me want to learn more, and Gershons take on the underground economy of jobs you dont know exist  made me want to read Alexa Clays book The Misfit Economy. I have known for a while that people who do a good job running illegal businesses are generally good entrepreneurs, but with a morality chip askew. For example, drug dealers  have always interested me. Clays book takes a fresh approach to these unsung heroes of innovation. If you think of the fine line between legal and illegal, she is just one half a hair on the legal side, with chapter titles like Hustle, Copy, Hack, Provoke, Pivot. This is a great tool book for finding that elusive idea for  a company. Clay reminds us that we dont need to invent a way to fly to outer space. And in fact, the person who invents the way probably wont make a bunch of money. Itll be the person who hustles, provokes or pivots in the most elegant waythat person will get all the kudos. This book is really a great way to start the unlearning process we have to go through after eighteen years of school teachers banging into our head that copying and hacking are wrong. Now that my  reading  is done, I want to give these books  as gifts, but I know they will just linger in the naggingly high piles of over-booked friends. So I am giving them to the thrift shop. I love that my pile is gone. So often our  piles of books to read is so threateningly tall  or dishearteningly  intellectual that it exhausts us just to live with the books, and decisions need to be made. Which is why I am keeping the Life-Changing Magic  of Tidying Up. Because it is life-changing, believe it or not.