5 steps to bookshelves that spark more joy!
After you have tidied your clothes, the second KonMari® category is books. This is a guide to Kondo-ing your books from a book lover and avid reader. Keep your chosen books with complete confidence and cherish them! If shelves upon shelves of books bring you joy, excellent. You may discover some books that you are now ready to part with. As you hone your own sensitivity to joy, allow this to guide you.
"Imagine what it would be like to have a bookshelf filled only with books that you really love. Isn't that image spellbinding? For someone who loves books, what greater happiness could there be?" - Marie Kondo
Step 1. Remove all your books from bookshelves and create piles of subcategories - fiction, non-fiction, travel, cookbooks and so on. Only looking at the spines on the shelf makes it hard to treat each book as an individual item with its own physical weight. Over time, a collection of books can become a fixed thing in our mind.
Step 2. "Wake up" your books by giving the piles a tap. if the books have been undisturbed for a while, there might be a bit of dust. it's time to consider them with fresh energy!
Step 3. Hold each book and ask yourself if it sparks joy? Let me be clear. I don’t mean that reading the book made you feel giddy with happiness. Some of the most meaningful and joyful books for me are those that made me weep: A Little Life, A Fine Balance, The Namesake and so on. The opportunity to live a myriad of emotionally complex lives is the joy of reading for me! But you can still ask yourself, are you happy to hold this book in your hands? Once you have read this book, do you need to reference it for information or will you read it again for entertainment? If you haven't read it, are you joyfully anticipating opening it up to read it? Will simply seeing this book on your shelf make you feel good? Is this book part of your ideal lifestyle?
"Step" 4. Do not be tempted to start reading! Keep the process moving, holding each book in both hands, scanning the cover and at most flicking through a page or two.
Step 5. After wiping down your shelves, organise the books you keep in a way that sparks joy. This can be by colour, height, genre or a mix. Mine are loosely by genre, then colour with my most frequently used reference books on the most accessible shelf. You might choose to display piles of books interspersed with ornaments or other objects that spark joy. I have plenty of client examples for this over on instagram. This is also how I display cookbooks in our kitchen at home.
Perhaps some books feel like a burden, a to-do list you just don't want to do! You might have outgrown textbooks that you once kept for credibility. Passing on these books can feel liberating and make your resulting shelves more joyful. Intentionally choosing which books to keep in your life is a step towards your ideal lifestyle. Do not force yourself to cull. Rather I invite you to try out this process, listen to your gut and see how you get on!