The Life Changing Magic of Japanese Tidying: Books

After skipping a day to hang out with my husband at the zoo, I moved onto Konmaring my books.  I LOVE books, but I don't have a lot of them because I also LOVE libraries and rarely read the same book more than once.  I forgot to take a picture of my books before, but suffice it to say that I got rid of over half of them.  Marie Kondo says she only has 30 books.  I have more than that, but probably winnowed down significantly more than most people do.

Books to get rid of:

I did break three of Marie Kondo's rules. 

1.  She says that a book that you haven't read, but intend to someday, is really a book you will never read.  I have 13 such books that are sitting separately on their own shelf.  I intend to prove her wrong.  

2. She also wouldn't like that some of my books are horizontally stored.  She thinks everything should be vertical.  She even stores her laptop vertically like a book on the shelf.  But, this is the way they seemed to fit best on my shelves.

3.  I am not storing all of my books in one place.  She says all items in a category should be in one place because you really don't have to travel far in a typical Japanese home to get to anything and storing everything keeps storage simple.  My home is not a typical Japanese home and the book case is on a different floor from my kitchen.  It just makes sense to store those in my kitchen.  There are other books I want to store elsewhere but didn't.  By bird field guide would, for example, be much handier near where I see birds.

My Tidy Bookshelf

Stay tuned:  I'm about to break another rule!