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July 14, 2005
Two Books that Were Better than I Expected
- Confessions of an Organized Homemaker, by Deniece Schofield. I don't know why I overlooked this one the first time I thumbed through it. It struck me as basically a collection of organizing tips, and while I'm all for tips, after a while they all start to sound the same. What I had missed, however, was the author's emphasis on underlying principles, which I find much more useful. Most organizing books seem to have some sort of introductory apparatus in which they ask you to figure out why you're cluttered (what sort of psychological blockages are at work), and then a general decluttering scheme that usually asks you to sort your clutter into three or four different boxes or piles, and then some room-by-room advice. Confessions certainly does all this, and does it well, but what I found most useful was the reiteration of fundamental approaches. For instance, the author suggests that you always make things easier to put away than to get out, and that you make items as easy to fetch with one hand motion as possible. I found myself going through my house afterwards, tweaking my systems here and there with her fundamentals in mind, which in the end was much more useful for me than a list of more specific suggestions.
- The Wabi-Sabi House, by Robyn Griggs Lawrence. When I first started noticing discussion on the web about wabi-sabi (which according to this helpful Wikipedia article, is an aesthetic "sometimes described as one of beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, or incomplete"), I thumbed through a few picture books on it and found myself rapidly annoyed by the aesthetic that might be described as expensively chic, meticulously crafted attempts to look unmeticulous. But this book, though it runs into some internal contradictions, does seem willing to wrestle with the incongruities between a centuries-old Japanese way of life and contemporary American efforts to turn it into a strategy for interior decorating. I can see how many readers would be irritated by the sometimes cheap solutions to that ambivalence--for instance, the recommendation that, one night a week, you practice washing dishes by hand in order to, I don't know, restore your connection to the dishes. But these kinds of tensions should be familiar to anyone who wants on one hand to live a simple life and on the other hand wants to have working plumbing and electricity. I came away with some respect for the author's honesty, as well as some decorating ideas. And it's not every home decor book that quotes not only from ancient Japanese tea masters but also from P.J. O'Rourke and Baudrillard. (You may find the amazon.com review posted by this reviewer a more helpful commentary than my dithering).
Posted by Miki at July 14, 2005 09:32 AM