Marie Kondo

Presents a guide to cleaning and organizing a living space, discussing best methods for decluttering and the impact that an organized home can have on mood and physical and mental health.

The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing

The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up

Kiran Aftab

3.5/5 time to be a clean freak… jk I always was one

Abbie Duggan

In hindsight, listening to this on audiobook was not a great idea. Really snoozed out on bits about folding socks, and generally could have used a lot less... of all of it. But, the point was made and now I’m off to tidy my room.

Pratik M

A perfect accompaniment for my recent obsession with decluttering. Contrary to what most believe, decluttering is less about owning less and more about owning what really matters to you. As Kondo states repeatedly, keep only the things that give you joy and discard the rest regardless of how important it once was to you or even how important you think it may be sometime (codeword for never) in the future. Although she repeats herself a lot in the first few chapters, I think the subject demands that she do because unlearning what most of us consider normal behavior can take a little bashing in.

After stressing on the importance of discarding, Kondo spends the majority of the rest of her book by offering practical tips that let you discard more and often. Although she is at loss for words at times to explain her ways making her resort to spiritual reasons, her intentions are clear. As most Japanese, she anthropomorphizes inanimate objects but there is a method to her quirky obsessive methods. She even tackles the holy grail of book ownership that most bibliophiles put beyond debate. 

Overall, it is an enlightening read and probably you may even chose to read it again to be inspired once more. I've definitely learned a lot and even implemented several of her techniques in addition to taking her advice to heart. My house is much more lighter now but definitely more airy and a pleasant space to be in.

Timeo Williams

Takeaways from this Japanese master-organizer, Marie Kondo:

- Choosing what you want to keep should be based of emotions: Ask if the item in your hand strikes you with joy?

- When tidying, do so by category, not simply what is near by. For example, if tidying up books, collect all books under one's possession to do so. 

- For clothes, it is advisable not to use hangers, unless the clothes are sincerely asking for one. Fold clothes in a gradient like color scheme.

Easiest to read nonfiction book yet. The main takeaway from this book is to keep what you absolutely love and get rid of everything else.

Liz Hunsaker

A few key takeaways - about twice as long as it needed to be. 

Kirsten Haney

lots of firsts for me: audiobook, borrowed from an online library, and self-help book

immediately know this is not for everyone but as a yapper myself i found this enjoyable in audiobook form. it helps that i really do like talking about storage space and home organizing. marie kondo’s random thoughts or life stories also made it interesting for me. it did actually make me clean too.

overall, enjoyed but don’t think it’s an essential/must read

moira

lots of firsts for me: audiobook, borrowed from an online library, and self-help book

immediately know this is not for everyone but as a yapper myself i found this enjoyable in audiobook form. it helps that i really do like talking about storage space and home organizing. marie kondo’s random thoughts or life stories also made it interesting for me. it did actually make me clean too.

overall, enjoyed but don’t think it’s an essential/must read

Tobias V. Langhoff

As most self-help books, especially those with the word “magic” in their titles, this one also contains some tips that seem pretentious. Things like thanking your shoes for serving you when you take them off seem pretty outlandish (and I did not start doing that). When decluttering, Kondo wants you to only keep items that bring you a “spark of joy”.

However, this book is actually quite ruthless. An object doesn’t bring you joy in your life? Throw it out. To the horror of all Goodreads members, I’m sure, she advocates throwing out books after you’ve read them. The gist of the book: Get rid of your shit. Your messy shit is making your head and life messy. This is the magic. And it works.

It seems simple enough. And it is. It seems dumb that Marie Kondo hold private classes about her KonMari method which, yes, is named after her. Japanese TV made a dramatization of her life and work. Yet her method works. Do you need to read this book to find out? Not really, a quick perusal of any article about it will probably make your life better.

Simone Felisati

Offers a variety of tools on how to tidy up your home, both the physical and spiritual one that we all have.

Gracie Marsden

I really enjoyed reading this book. It wasn’t the specific applications of how to tidy that influenced me the most but her overall minimalist philosophy and focus on things that truly bring you joy. It has really helped me to re-evaluate a lot of the things I have been spending time and money on and realizing I didn’t really want them at all. What a wonderful little book to read in our consumerist society.

hileahrious

Brilliant book, whether or not you like tidying. You will learn so much more than you expect and also get a little glimpse into Japanese culture. 

To sum up the book, a quote from it: 

“I can think of no greater happiness in life than to be surrounded only by the things I love. How about you?”

Melissa Palmer

Book #98 Read in 2015
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

A few friends had talked about this book and I was curious. About halfway through, I was a bit tired of hearing the same techniques mentioned over and over again. I did like the idea that if something brings you joy, keep it. If it doesn't, get rid of it. That being said, I doubt that author would love the huge amount of unread books I have in my home, but they bring me joy so I'm keeping them :-) I borrowed this book from the town library. 

http://melissasbookpicks.blogspot.com

Mae Erceg

Great tips but Marie is a bit judgy so minus a star for her elitism. Other than that, I’m excited to implement her tidying up process into my cleaning, organizing, and decluttering routines.

Aditi

Easy read and super readable for what it is.

Matija

alexandra

5/5 ♡ this book is truly life-changing and magical.

i picked it up a year or so ago, but only read a few pages before putting it down again. a few days ago, i had the sudden urge to clean my mess of a room and decided to read this beforehand. and oh my goodness, this book is a miracle worker.

the concept isn't that complicating: 1) throw out any item that doesn't "spark joy" and 2) make a "home" for each item. of course there are details on how you do the KonMari process, but that's the main gist. i decided to put it in practice (at 3 am; i was jet lagged) starting with my closet. i ended up with 8 full trash bags of clothes and the sun fully up above my roof. it's already been a few days and i can literally feel the difference. now that i only have clothes that truly bring joy, i cherish each and every item.

in terms of everything else, some of marie kondo's ideas were a bit bizarre (talking to inanimate objects). i understood where she was coming from (and put it into practoce myself – it helps) but i just wanted to point that out. at first glance, some of her claims could sound crazy.

buuuuut i would still recommend this book to everyone. this is the type of book i would buy ten copies of and give it to all my friends/relatives for christmas. although i'm still in the process of putting her concepts into practice, i truly believe the results will be magical for both my house (or in this case, my room) and my life.

Courtney

I found a lot of the ideas in this book charming and helpful overall! I like the idea of tidying by category of items rather than their location. There were many interesting tips provided in this book, but I found a good amount of it repetitive and oddly uncomfortable. I like practicing gratitude in what I have in life, but not necessarily TO what I have. I'm sorry, but I don't talk to my purse.

Cheri Fuller

I'm someone who doesn't tend to horde a lot of things but the past few years, excess possessions and clutter have been creeping up. After seeing a couple episodes of Marie Kondo's Netflix series, I decided to pick up two of her books to see if my family could benefit from her technique.


Overall, yeah, I think her method of discarding and organizing will help us out. I'm not big on the more emotional aspects - my clothes and possessions having feelings and valuing my gratitude - but I can get behind about 90% of what she had to say.

I'm planning to read Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up very soon and then I'll be starting off on reacquainting myself with all of my stuff.

Colleen

1 Star

I hated this book. 

I honestly went into it with an open mind. I nodded along with the first couple of pages. Yes, we have too much clutter in our lives, too much useless junk. Yes, I feel less stressed when I am in an organized environment. But any agreement quickly evaporated. Because Marie Kondo is one of the most insufferable authors I have EVER had the displeasure of experiencing!!! I tried at first to rationalize that some of this was due to bad translation of the book and to be mindful of cross-cultural differences. But in the end, it seems that she is just that condescending, narcissistic, and frankly bat-shit-crazy. By the time I got to the part where she describes ripping up her books to only keep pages with quotes she likes, I knew there was no hope for this book to be anything other than headache inducing. 

I am not trying to make light of mental illness, believe me. This author seems seriously unstable. She clearly has severe OCD. She mentions panic attacks, nervous breakdowns, social isolation, family issues, fainting from being so overwhelmed by clutter, and more. Luckily she has found a career where she can market her obsessive neatness and charge a boatload of money for her officiousness. I probably should not mention it, but I kept thinking of the TV show "Monk" where an OCD man uses his acute attention to detail to solve crimes. It does not seem that Kondo actually dealt with any of her issues; she just channeled them into something else in an epic display of displacement. She claims that once you purge your worldly possessions everything else in your life - from your health to your relationships - will essentially fix themselves. 

One of the oddest things was that she claims that purging your possessions will lead to your body trying to purge itself. She says that this most commonly manifests itself into immediate explosive diarrhea. That's right. She proudly proclaims that her life philosophy leads to 
  explosive diarrhea
. I am not even kidding. In my mind, the only thing that should ever happily claim to cause diarrhea is anti-constipation medicine. 

The "Konmarie" method (the name she gives to it, gag) is completely unoriginal. It is a hodgepodge of different theories and ideas that she mixed together and claimed to originate. But really she just wrapped it up into a popular package. Take for example, her method of folding clothes. It is not new, and it certainly was not created by her. I've been folding clothes like that since middle school and I most definitely did not learn it from her.

Kondo brags incessantly about her how NONE of her clients relapse. Why? Well, despite the repeated brags about how successful her program is, there is only one tiny mention of the caveat of this success: none of the people who successfully complete the program relapse into messiness. However, part of "completing" her program is achieving a state of mind that prohibits clutter. If you relapse then you obviously did not achieve the correct mental status needed to join the cult, ergo you did not truly complete her program ergo her relapse rate can never be anything other than zero percent. Smart. From a marketing point of view, this is admittedly quite genius. The one thing I will give her props for is that she is clearly good at selling her package. And you know what, if you use this and it actually helps you, more power to you. But I can't see anything other than prettily packaged bullshit - a combination of old ideas and life philosophies that she mashed together and claimed to have come up with all on her own and is now sitting back to suck the money out of. 

Not that she seemed to need the money anyway. Reading between the lines, she must come from a rich family. She talks about the four bedroom she up in in Japan. (Do you know how expensive real estate is in Japan?!) She talks about her many, many shopping sprees followed by purging everything in some sort of unhealthy shopping bulimia. And now she is even richer. This is not someone who has ever had to over come the post Great Depression mentality of keeping things because you might need them and can't avoid to buy new things that is so commonly passed down generations. There is nothing in this book about fiscal responsibility. Kondo says that the joy comes from buying the possessions not from actually having them. Basically that you might as well throw them away immediately because you already got all the enjoyment from them that you are going to get. 

She contradicts herself and is suspiciously cagey about certain things. Like she says that she is horrified when she thinks about how she used to throw out family members' possessions without permission, but then she subtly tells readers to do that very thing. The tone of the entire book is self-righteous, conceited, highhanded, and manipulative.

She advocates that all of your objects are sentient and want to be useful to you, but that if they no longer bring you joy to toss them in the trash so that they can be reincarnated into new objects that exist to please you. It felt like some horrible acid trip version of "The Brave Little Toaster." Like your possessions are wasting away from depression because you don't love them enough. Clearly the only solution is to murder them in the trash shoot so that they can be reborn into new objects which will then slave away towards your happiness until such time that they once again cease to bring you joy. Then you can murder them again. Ahem, I mean, release them to be reborn.

Nope, not drinking that Kool-Aid. 

Any usefulness was obliterated by the sheer overwhelming highhandedness of the author. This book did not inspire ANY joy in me. It did inspire a malicious desire to shove the author into a Costco and force her to watch Americans bulk buy useless junk until her brain overloads and short circuits into a molten lump of smugness and smoking wires. So it will probably be for the best if I avoid ever reading anything by her ever again. I'm not saying that other people will find this book as infuriating and useless as I did. You might want to pick it up if, you know... you have a strong desire for diarrhea-inducing self-righteousness. 


RATING FACTORS:
Ease of Reading: 1 Star
Writing Style: 1 Star
Usefulness: 1 Star
Plot Structure and Development: 1 Star
Attention to Detail: 1 Star
Objectiveness: 1 Star

Matthew Royal

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.

Gillian Rose

She was definitely condescending and some of the tips are bizarre but it was a good book. I do feel like I should follow her method somewhat. I really started to feel for her toward the end when she discussed being a middle child because I get it.

This is a solid book honestly. Clear straightforward and has a lot of practical methods to stay tidy. 

Anna Cordero

I really enjoyed this book, and my wardrobes never looked so tidy. There is truth in the sense of joy it brings when opening a drawer or wardrobe when all your items are stacked by shade or size. 

I would recommend this book to someone looking for a fresh start. 

jason birchall

I really enjoyed this book, and my wardrobes never looked so tidy. There is truth in the sense of joy it brings when opening a drawer or wardrobe when all your items are stacked by shade or size. 

I would recommend this book to someone looking for a fresh start. 

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and star of Netflix’s Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, this graphic novel brings Kondo's life-changing tidying method to life with the fun, quirky story of a woman who transforms her home, work, and love life using Kondo's advice and inspiration. In The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo presents the fictional story of Chiaki, a young woman in Tokyo who struggles with a cluttered apartment, messy love life, and lack of direction. After receiving a complaint from her attractive next-door neighbour about the sad state of her balcony, Chiaki gets Kondo to take her on as a client. Through a series of entertaining and insightful lessons, Kondo helps Chiaki get her home - and life - in order. This insightful, illustrated case study is perfect for people looking for a fun introduction to the KonMari Method of tidying up, as well as tried-and-true fans of Marie Kondo eager for a new way to think about what sparks joy. Featuring illustrations by award-winning manga artist Yuko Uramoto, this book also makes a great read for manga and graphic novel lovers of all ages.

A Magical Story to Spark Joy in Life, Work and Love

The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up

Far more interesting than I thought it was going to be. It was nice reading about Marie's life as well as seeing how well thought out her philosophy is. Worth the read for sure.

The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing

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