The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondō

A Bijin-ga by Shimura Tatsumi (1907-80)

(December 2) I really liked this -- it definitely speaks to a need I have, and makes it seem like tidying up in the Marie Kondō way would solve all the problems in life -- the income tax, the house insurance, the how-much-more of that to buy or get… and the method is fascinating… and Kondō treats it spiritually, which is so interesting but so much in line with Abraham-Hicks that it’s scary.

The book (the philosophy) gives you a lot of hope.

Marie Kondō’s voice is so sweet and pure, a joy to read even if you didn’t like her tidying-up philosophy one bit (but, as she says, you wouldn’t be reading the book if you were messy and didn’t care).

I want to follow the plan properly -- I`m pretty sure it will bring the magic she talks about. I will probably buy this one. (ETA: I did buy this book, but I have not followed the plan in the two and a half years since I read it, because I haven’t found the time to do it “properly.” Kondō warns that if you don’t execute the sorting properly and completely the first time, you will never achieve the magic part.)

I can’t find a note about why I wanted to read this or where I heard about it -- I am pretty sure it was recommended by someone I follow… I can’t remember who… but I’m glad I was directed to it…

I identified closely and tenderly with Marie Kondō’s interpretation of the psychology of her interest in tidying -- she feels like she never trusted people, but could always trust things. To her, things never deserve anything but tenderness and gentleness. I totally get that.

The only negative vibe for me in all of this was: where is all this stuff going? Kondō often boasts that clients she works with will have 30 - 45 trash bags full of items they are discarding after just the first day, and they will have dozens more over the course of the subsequent stages. She’s had thousands of clients. Is it all just being moved around Japan?

Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud, Elizabeth Greenwood

Noémi Schipfer and Takami Nakamoto, Hide and Seek, 2012

(November 25) I forget how I heard about this book, but the topic is of course interesting.

The book begins with Elizabeth Greenwood talking to a lot of people who investigate death fraud and it was mildly interesting to learn all the telltale signs of not being dead and how people can track you down thereby… and about how the age of the internet works against you because of digital footprints but also can work for you if you know how to fake up a lot of websites and false digital trails.

But Greenwood starts off her non-fiction book with the premise that her research journey was all intensely personal -- she had $60,000 in student debt and wanted to be free of it, so that’s why she looked into faking one’s death. Also, she likes the romance of death-faking.

This would have been OK as a starter and with one or two additional mentions throughout the book… it’s standard practice in books of this kind… the having of a personal reason for launching an investigation of a topic.

But this girl never lets it go! And it becomes tedious af, especially when shored up with little anecdotes about other aspects of her life, particularly “humorous” stories about how clumsy she is or what a loser she is.

Argh, it feels like so much padding…. A feeling that gets starker when you consider the length of the book (244 pages) and the size of the pages (very small).

Why do people do that, or why do people’s editors allow them to do that? The topic is super interesting on its own and she has so many good interviews with would-be death fakers that you think she surely could have expanded those stories and done without the “I-too-want-to-escape-my-(small)-debt” posture.

And then you realize her editors probably encouraged the personal business….. WHY?????

That put me off quite a bit.

But then Greenwood went for a little while into the death-hoax conspiracy believers, the groups that think Elvis, Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson, Princess Di, and many others (all beloved celebrities) faked their deaths and are either coming back soon or are currently being portrayed by a look-alike. This blew me away.

So: kind of an interesting little book, significantly spoiled by an identity crisis, when it decided it wanted to be a humorous memoir as much as an investigative research piece.

The Woman I Wanted to Be, Diane von Furstenberg

Eric Pattee, Sketch Loosely Based on Diane von Furstenberg, c 2015

(February 10, 2017 -- i.e., 3½ months later) I saw this recommended on several fashion Instagrams I follow, and noted that it was short, and committed to it.

However, I don’t understand how those Instagrammers liked it enough to recommend it… I mean, it’s not a horrible memoir… but it feels a little sanitized ...or a little too polished… or something. DVF doesn’t whitewash unflattering or unhappy moments in her life, but they all “help her learn something” or they open a door to something else that turns out well… she is not someone to dwell on miseries (or she realizes misery doesn’t make a good memoir)... (and of course being someone who doesn’t dwell on unhappy events is a good thing to be, so why am I kvetching???).

The material that sounds true and honest, unpolished, uncurated is when DVF describes a great passion -- like admiring her mother, loving her father, wanting to prove herself over and over.

The rest of the time the stories are pretty managed and everything is glossy-magazine level -- her daughter is “beautiful,” her granddaughters are “beautiful,” everyone she loves is “beautiful” or “handsome,” etc.

It’s almost as if her flaws and disappointments are included calculatingly to offset the glossiness.

She drops a lot of names but doesn't give us insight into anybody, or even much description of anybody other than to say she loved them and, WAY MORE IMPORTANTLY, they saw her talent and gave her career boosts.

You get a little bit of a sense of how a designer sets up a business, and a bit of an understanding of how a business fails even when it looks publicly like a raging success, so that was interesting.

Interesting in a totally minor way was the organization… DVF went through a number of different themes of her life from beginning to end, and along the way would re-showcase all of her relationships and homes in terms of where they were at that time. It’s like: she didn’t just tell the story of her and Egon beginning to end, done and dusted, then move on chronologically. She would tell new stories about Egon or Barry Diller or one of her many lovahs when she got to the appropriate moment in the history of the first wrap dress, or each of her companies, or each of her major home locations..

It was a strangely good way to flesh stuff out.

I never found out what exactly DVF meant by “the woman I wanted to be”.... It changed constantly throughout her life, like it does for us all. I thought by the title that she maybe had a childhood vision that she made into reality in a dramatic, inspiring way, but she…. didn’t.

The Queen of the Night, Alexander Chee

François Flameng, Equestrienne Au Cirque Fernando, 1890

(November 13, 2017) It took me over a year to finish this, but I don't know why, because I liked it a lot, right from the start. It is long, but mostly it lingered because it is a story easy to put down and pick up, being picaresque, and my other library books at the time had more relentless deadlines.

As I look at reviews I see the exact words I would use to describe it -- lush, sweeping, rags-to-riches, picaresque, "all the glorious elements of great operas of the era: love at first sight, disguise, intrigue, grief, betrayal, secrets, scheming aristocrats, a besotted tenor, dramatic escapes, grand settings, fabulous costumes, murder, fallen women, sacrifice -- the follies of humans at the mercy of Fate."

The plupart of the appeal for me is that it is a collection of interesting stories about interesting women.

But I also loved the details about Victorian life and particularly Victorian life for people in opera (or music in general) in the second French empire... Chee takes up so many fascinating tangents just to enjoy late 19th-century things, and his joy is contagious.

The ending was surprising, and great.

I learned of this book through The Toast, when the author, Alexander Chee, was interviewed for his advice to young writers.

The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century, Joel F. Harrington

Lukas Mayer, Execution of Peter Stumpp, 1589

(October 13) I got interested in this book because of Daniel Mallory Ortberg's review on The Toast, which is a great piece because ...yeah… that’s not how I pictured “being broken on the wheel.”

So I read the book for that but enjoyed it for much more than the small issue of the wheel… it’s a lot of good research, which is always a pleasure to read, and it is quite eye-opening on a number of the conditions of living in the 16th century…I felt quite grateful to be living in modern times early on and more so as the book developed.

But the book is pretty gruesome… Harrington doesn’t belabor the grisliness but you can’t help describing a lot of punishments and torture mechanisms when writing a biography of an executioner ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nonetheless, I was really taken aback by the descriptions of life in a big city in the 16th century and, maybe because of our current times, sensitive to how racist and classist people were. The caste system I would have only ever expected to see in India was completely intact in 16th-century Nuremberg and so presumably throughout Europe. Life was brutal and difficult just on the most practical level but on top of that people really tried to take advantage of other people (or at least it seems so through the executioner’s eyes).

So the century seems so foreign and far away, and yet -- this was the most striking thing -- people were doing exactly the same things to be cheeky, to play jokes, to have fun as people do today… and they used the same swear words and “dirty” words and phrased them the same way.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose… only I should be quoting this in German.

To sum up: fascinating and eye-opening

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert

Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Self-Portrait, 1790

(September 22) I’ll never forget how much I liked Eat, Love, Pray, mostly because I went into it thinking I would be sneering and catcalling the whole way. But it was great, and I loved EG’s writing style.

Nevertheless, I forgot all about her for about six years, till a week or two ago when there stories about her interesting relationship with Rayya Elias.

Two recent Gilbert titles mentioned in these stories, The Signature of All Things and Big Magic, came to me from the library almost immediately; I started reading Big Magic first, and just inhaled it, finishing it off in two and half days.

I liked this book a lot because it is about the writing process, and EG likes thinking about the writing process as much as I do.

She has a really interesting theory about creativity and inspiration that I’m not sure I buy into totally, but what’s enchanting about it is that it’s compatible with Abraham-Hicks doctrine and even kind of supports A-H stuff in little micro ways that give me shivers when I see them from this perspective.

She is giving advice to would-be writers, and you can see the genesis of the book -- “Hey, Liz, you’re a big mega-successful writer now -- how about a how-to guide for the jillions of people who think they could have a career like yours???”

And she probably said -- YASSSSSS! ...because it’s obvious she likes this topic and she probably felt she had a lot of new stuff to add to it, because she really does.

The artwork above is meant to illustrate a talented Elizsabeth demonstrating what she does in the form she uses to do it.

The Hero's Walk, Anita Rau Badami

Lalu Prasad Shaw, Babu Resting, 2012/13

(August 15) I heard about this on the CBC one night driving back from the hospital after visiting Mom. It was one of the books in the Canada Reads “competition,” during which the proponents of different books as the year’s “best book” advocate for their choice in a debate format.

As I was listening for that hour one night (rainy and cold) it was down to The Hero’s Walk and The Illegal by Lawrence Hill. I had read neither nor even heard of either, but the advocates for the two books (low-level celebrities of various kinds) made me want The Hero’s Walk to “win.”

It didn’t -- in the end the audience voted The Illegal the winner by a narrow margin. I wonder now (not yet having read The Illegal) if that was possibly because The Hero’s Walk was only glancingly about Canada (I don’t know if the books that make it to the competition have to be set in Canada or only just be written by a Canadian or only just be published by a Canadian publisher or what). The Hero’s Walk takes place mostly in India; the role played by Vancouver could have been played by any North American city, the point being to contrast the two cultures clashing for wee Nandana. Maybe the The Illegal seemed to the audience more “Canadian” although none of the celebrities said that in their comments?

I can’t remember now if the Hamilton Library had The Hero’s Walk or not, but it was easily obtainable from Mills. The Illegal, on the other hand, was not available through Mills and there was a long waiting list for it at HPL.

I liked The Hero’s Walk from the start -- it had all the elements of the Indian novels I have read and loved in the past, like by V.S. Naipaul, Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Kipling: the endearing charming Indians, the crazy crowded spectacle of Indian life, the heart-breaking contrasts between tragedy and comedy.

For a long time while reading it I was wondering why it was called The Hero’s Walk… there were mentions of Hindu tales and myths referencing the Indian hero, and of course Indian movies, but it was all very subtle for the longest time. Eventually it’s clear that the title highlights Nirmala’s dancing school above all the other traditional stuff, and that Nirmala is really the hero the men wish to be -- steady, loving, positive. So that is a nice feature, because when we are introduced to her through Sripathi’s point of view at the beginning, when he is still mean and pinched and haughty, she comes off as silly and cowlike, another mistake he made in his youth.

But eventually you realize that that was just a bad point of view.

Sripathi transforms -- and at a late stage of life, too!! Yay for the late 50s! -- and does become a hero, or more of one.

Anyway, it’s a nice little book, with, as I say, that affectionate capture of Indian psychology whereby everything is ironically or sarcastically loving.

Thank heavens not so searing as Mistry’s A Fine Balance, which made me decide never to read another Indian novel since they were too harrowing. But here there is a lot of loss and sorrow and floating in shit water, too, as always.

The Happiness Makeover: How to Teach Yourself to Be Happy and Enjoy Every Day, M.J. Ryan

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Seated Clown (Mademoiselle Cha-U-Kao), 1896

(July 6) This was recommended by the Utne Reader... the excerpt suggested that it might be like Law of Attraction stuff… and that’s why I read it… I am always testing LoA against other theories… it’s never been completely contradicted by any other point of view I’ve read, but different people piece it together blindly, not seeing the freedom and agency of LoA, just the “truth” that being positive results in positivity… here in a similar vein the recommendations for happiness are consistent with LoA, but lack understanding of it… and I’m so happy to “get" LoA, because, otherwise, I would have to conclude that this is a book for really sad people, and it’s sad to think there are people who are this sad and who are glad for the morsels of comfort offered by this vague an approximation of LoA…

I’m giving it 2.5 stars because it’s a bit formulaic in construction… 1, 2, 3, a, b, c, anecdote from real life; analysis; solution… all these books are like this but you shouldn’t feel it happening with each chapter… in this book there were quite a few “anecdotes from life” that really didn’t suit the problem they were meant to illustrate, so those passages made you conscious of the formula grinding along, and then once or twice Ryan used her own situation of having to work on her books while others are lounging as an example of a happiness problem ...and so you think -- ugh, sorry you had to do this unhappy work for us

So that was odd

I think Ryan’s advice for gaining happiness is very good… I just feel it would help everyone more if she had the whole picture... there’s a reason gloom brings more gloom

[Added a year later (August 11, 2017): I was reading the Utne newsletter today and saw this title… and wondered, “Have I read this? It seems like the kind of thing I would enjoy.” So I didn’t remember I had read it at all and I had to come here to check. I see why I didn’t remember it.]

The Stench of Honolulu, Jack Handey

Salvador Dali, Ship With Butterfly Sails, 1937

(April 3) Jack Handey is so surreal but so hilarious… all I want to do is quote from this book over and over till I’ve copied out the whole thing.

OK, here are five random book openings:

I’ve always wanted to be an inventor. But the “powers that be” have decided the world doesn’t need things like the cardboard canoe, for when you only feel like canoeing for an hour or so and you’re too lazy to drag your canoe out of the water.

I littered for miles. I was starting to get bored when, out of the blue, a patch of bright green appeared. I was tickled pink. It was a golf course, with a big clubhouse set in the middle. Finally, something in Hawaii that was pretty.

The red boat chugged past us upriver. My plan had worked. I turned to Leilani. I wanted to gloat, but as a man I had other desires. I wanted to tell her how I had been right and she had been wrong. Wait, I guess that’s gloating.

Don and I nodded agreement. Is it wrong to lie because you’re planning to steal something? That’s a question probably only the philosophers can answer. One thing I knew for sure: The Golden Monkey did not want to be gawked at. He wanted to be melted down into smooth little ingots and smuggled to America inside someone’s rectum.

He twisted, just in time to get another volley of sticks in the back, then twisted again to get some more in the front. He lurched back and forth. A couple of late sticks bounced off his head. He looked like a porcupine, only not a regular porcupine -- a porcupine of sticks.

Completely random, but to me all completely hilarious.

Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person, Shonda Rhimes

D.B. Merlin, Shonda Rhimes, 2010

(March 26) Never watched her shows (any of them) but you cannot help knowing about them if you spend any time on the internet. Why did I put my name in for this book? Was it because Lena Dunham recommended it (and likes her a lot? ...because I was all Lena all the time there for a while and maybe still am).

Anyway, girl took a long, long time to get to the point of the “year of yes” title… like, much longer than I needed in order to be persuaded. Then, having set this all up, she goes ahead and dismantles it step by step…. and you realize this “year of yes” stuff was backfitted onto an existing desire to grab glory that she felt was perhaps too arrogant in itself.

It’s like she’s saying -- “I never celebrated myself on the way up and now I want to because after all I am talented and it’s not wrong to recognize one’s own talent and we should all do that and if we all did that I wouldn’t look so arrogant! But anyway -- it’s OK to be arrogant!”

She has a lot of energy. But her writing style. Her writing style is very stylized. So stylized I don’t know if I like it. I am imitating it now. How do you like it?

Anyway -- although Shonda Rhimes clearly has talent and it was not a huge burden to read this book, I am less interested than I ever was to watch Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Scandal, or How to Get Away with Murder. I developed some retroactive sympathy for Katherine Heigl’s issue back in the day, even.

There is so much misdirection and multiplicity going on here that the bullshit alarm goes off more than one likes.

Not That Kind of Girl, Lena Dunham

Megan Pryce, Lena Dunham, 2014

(March 9) I found myself really liking this book… but it was strange… it didn’t make me heh-heh like Tina Fey would; it didn’t make me laugh like Miranda July, Nora Ephron or Mindy Kaling would… but I thought about it when I wasn’t reading it.

Sometimes I just thought, bah, this entitled girl of the new millennium -- she just has the same problems as every girl in history has ever had and the same self-fixation …. her problems are just a little more pathetic than usual… which she is somehow “fixing” or “rationalizing” or “moving on” from by being ironic???? I’m not sure; "kids today!"

I mean, I wouldn’t want people to know that men had treated me the way some men have treated Lena Dunham…. but I can’t think why it helps anything to keep such things private, either.

Though she and every new young thing in the world (cf. Holden Caulfield) like to be blasé about everything, they are shocked by the same things that shock all of us, and they like to haul them out and give everyone a good blast of trauma every once in a while. (I was going to say “old people don’t do this” but then thought of Jerry Saltz.)

Mostly, though, it’s that every once in a while Dunham, whose problems we all share and are so banal, is very profoundly insightful…. e.g., about her body and that tiny man’s body… about feminism… “it would be easy to just be a jerk like a man but what a great honour it is to have to try to behave like a woman.”

The wisdom of her mother was compelling: “you don’t gain respect by….”

Dunham made me think about a lot of things, and especially a lot about feminism… I feel like I haven’t been feminist enough now ...and I was never shy about it.

If I ever had the chance to ask her a question about the book, though, it would be about whether Pepper, the little hamster whose fused hind legs were snipped apart with manicure scissors by Nathan the pervert teacher, went on to have a normal hamster life.

A hamster is a huge part of Tiny Furniture, come to think of it.

Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng

Deng Ming-Dao, Being Chinese American Series 2011: What We Expect of Women

(January 20) This was recommended by Nicole Chung at The Toast last fall (September 2, 2015), and was in hot demand at the library, so off I went.

I really liked it… it was fun to read “real fiction” again for some reason… I guess I've been reading so much nonfiction lately: Kate Hepburn’s biography, how-to books, and spiritual books (and Alexander McCall Smith, who’s so stylized in some ways as not to be “normal” fiction).

This mystery reminded me of Gone Girl or John Green’s books, but so much gentler. Good suspense, though, nonetheless.

The story is so touching in a racial-tension way, anyway, to begin with... at first you feel it’s “one of those aching stories about which the reader knows so much more than any of the characters,” which is fine in itself, but which makes what you actually are going to get so unexpected... the story becomes so much more complicated than you've been led to suspect, turning an apparently plausible narrative slowly over onto its head so that it means completely the opposite of what it first appeared to… there is very clever back-and-forth-ing in time, creating new and profound layers of meaning so that each scene is all the more wince-making when you re-encounter it … it's not heavy-handed, either… it doesn't wrench the story around… each new point of view is just a subtle shift … (it’s not like Rashomon or something).

Yeah -- I liked it… but I guess I did not lurve it… it took me till the library's drop-dead return date to finish it.

“Drop dead,” heh.