#Microblog Mondays 232: Books Sparking Joy
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Is this a post about Marie Kondo and books? Um… sort of.
I was trying to understand her concept of sparking joy. Watching the video immediately brought certain books to mind. The Magicians trilogy is a joy sparker. All of my copies of The Phantom Tollbooth? Each and every one fill me with joy. Tolkien, joy. Lewis, joy. My Crazy Rich Asians books, joy joy joy.
But should reading always be joyful? I don’t feel joy at all when I pick up Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz but wasn’t it important to read it and important to keep it? Fine, we can equate gratitude (for Levi writing the book) with joy and it remains on the bookshelf, but there are so many others that don’t fill me with any emotion, and I would still never give them away. They represent a moment in time or a story I may want to return to in the future or simply a good receptacle of knowledge. My reading isn’t always joyful or even enjoyable; there is plenty I read because I think there is a good reason to read it. Like the math book I’m reading right now; zero joy, 100% still think I should read it.
This isn’t commentary on Kondo’s method — I’m sure there is some nuanced loophole that allows you to keep as many books as you please. It’s more the thought over whether reading should always be enjoyable. Should we be aiming for pleasure or aiming for a different target?
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16 comments
I think we read for a range of reasons, and only one of those is to experience joy. We read to learn, for information, to challenge ourselves, to laugh, sometimes to cry, because we have to (for school/work), and I’m sure for many other reasons. All of those are equally valid.
When it comes to organizing, I actually had to hire someone to help me pick and choose, so I am *definitely* not advanced enough for Marie Kondo on my own ;).
When it comes to reading, I do think it’s important to read things that give joy, but also to read some of the hard/necessary stuff. I think there’s a point at which reading may be less to inspire “joy” and more because I think bearing witness is incredibly important (Lois Lowry makes this point really poignantly in “The Giver” and it’s stuck with me for decades). In the instance of learning things like math, I think some of that is that even though that particular book or experience *doesn’t* give me joy, it forms the necessary foundation for other knowledge or experiences that do.
I was just telling my daughter last night that it’s good to read books that are easy and fun, but she needs to throw challenging stuff in there too occasionally. She was reading a book called Espionage and Etiquette, where she had to ask the meaning of every 5th word. And she couldn’t picture the scenes in her mind – because it was outside her experience.
I generally read for pleasure.
Reading is an immersive experience for me. If I’m not all-in, I probably won’t finish the book. That said, I don’t just read junk food. If a book is both challenging and well-written, I’ll work my way through it. But if the content AND prose are dull? I can’t. I’ve found audiobooks work for consuming more tedious material.
I read for all different reasons: escape, pleasure, knowledge, to name a few. I still found the KonMari method useful for sorting my books. . . not because it made me give up valued books that didn’t necessarily “spark joy” for me but because it helped me to recognize which books I was just keeping for the sake of keeping, vs. due to really valuing them, or planning to read or re-read them.
I do think, though, that Marie Kondo is probably not a big book lover. And keep in mind that she is from a country where most people live in much smaller spaces than most Americans. Keeping the accumulation of possessions to a minimum — whether they are books, clothes, or tchotkes — makes a lot of sense in smaller spaces.
I just read a headline that said that “joy” is a mistranslation, but I didn’t actually read the article, so…
@a — Love that Gail Carriger series. One of my colleagues said her son got to pick Pride and Prejudice as a book for his Freshman class and he said he didn’t understand any of it (the other choices were Lear and Great Expectations). She’s worried because P&P is a comparatively easy book and she doesn’t understand what he doesn’t understand. I’m not sure what my point is, but your comment made me think of that (and the Victorian era isn’t that far after P&P in the grand scheme of things… though with more vampires and werewolves, fewer zombies).
I unabashedly read brain candy!
I have a different take on books than Marie Kondo has (which is what I think you’re getting at). The books I keep are ones I find myself reading and reference on a regular basis. Given we’ve done a lot of moving, the question isn’t whether I enjoyed the book/series or not, but whether I can justify carrying something up and down several flights of stairs. There have certainly been books I enjoyed that feel into the “donate” pile because of this mentality.
I don’t think it’s about reading at all- it’s about keeping books. The way you wrote your post made it sound like all books you read are also books you buy and keep. So, yes, reading doesn’t have to always be joyful, but it’s the decision to hang on to the book she’s asking about, not the decision to read it. And her follow up question for when people aren’t sure if something sparks joy is “is this something you want in your life going forward”. I think that really helps people determine what they are hanging on to just for the sake of hanging on to it. Inertia is powerful.
Hopefully most reading will be enjoyable. 🙂 But yes, as Mali said, sometimes we read for other reasons: to learn something new, because it’s part of a course we’re taking or a book club we belong to, etc. Turia & Cristy make good points too, though. It’s fine to keep books if you have the space — or, if you’re moving (to a similar-sized or larger space, where you still have room for them all), the energy (& money, if you’re hiring movers) to haul them around. I know I rarely culled my books before we decided to sell our house & move to a smaller space. My general feeling was that books were meant to be kept — but I was forced to make some decisions. And I did have quite a few books that I’d read that hadn’t made a huge impression, or had become outdated (non-fiction books), or had had for 20 years but still hadn’t read & was just hanging onto. Cookbooks I’d never tried a single recipe from. Travel guides that were 10 years old (& I figured I could always find the same/newer information on the Internet anyway). Those were the easy ones to cull. (It got harder after that…!)
Well personally I’m not good at being miserable, so if I don’t enjoy something odds are I won’t read it.
But you can certainly expand your definition of what joy and enjoyment is. In fact one could argue that’s exactly what learning is.
I think we read for a lot of different purposes. I admittedly am a hoarder of books and have been since I was a teenager. However, I do frequently read books over and over again. Well, I used to prior to kids anyway! Also admittedly, I generally tend to mostly read for pleasure.
I’m an English professor. I have more books than every other thing (combined). Reading for joy/pleasure? Yes, but also for knowledge, escape, deepening the grooves in the brain, etc. I keep books because I teach them–or might–and because my son who is also a reader might wish to read them. No sense in re-buying! 🙂
Ah, this was the part of Marie Kondo’s book that made me mad, and also made me think it was ironic that she wrote a book, since she stated that she keeps only 30 books at a time and believes that books you haven’t read yet and are saving for “someday” will never be read. ARGH. I have a huge stash of unread books, To Read Books, and I have read books that were on that shelf for years, recently. I look at it as insurance, and my own personal library, and know that if I suddenly fall ill or the zombie apocalypse comes, I will have plenty of good reading material. We moved all our books ourselves, and it was A LOT. Thousands upon thousands. But books are important to us — not just to spark joy through reading them, but to have them as a sort of record of life. Bryce has all his math-y physics-y books, I have all my books from my English degree. We have books from fertility, books from adoption, books from redoing our first house. I have a shit-ton of teaching-related books. I don’t read them all for the joy (although several recently have certainly sparked it and given me the total escape I so desperately need), but some for learning, and because they are important in the grand scheme of things, in understanding hard truths.
So yeah, long story short, books spark joy for a lot of different reasons, and it doesn’t have to get read because you will purely enjoy it. (Also, apparently on the show she never makes people get rid of their books and seems to have relaxed a bit on that front.)
I agree with you that joy isn’t the sole criteria for books. That’s pulling from only a sliver of the emotional spectrum. Maybe it would be better put as satisfying my quest to understand. Or “does it make my view bigger/deeper in some way?” And the very basic: “Am I glad to have spent my attention on this book?”
I’m largely ignoring all things Kondo. Except for the part of releasing things. I need to clean out a bunch of closets, and it always feels so wasteful to get rid of perfectly good items that I might use. . .someday. But I am awash in too much stuff, and my grandfather died with a basement crammed with “maybe someday” items–there is a lesson there for me.
But I really stopped by today to leave this, because I thought of you: https://www.audible.com/ep/chooseyourownadventure?source_code=AUDOR2580131199PGV&%3Bref_=pe_3856410_391978310&ipRedirectOverride=true&overrideBaseCountry=true&pf_rd_p=d365de4e-b0cd-459e-a51c-61d213c827eb&pf_rd_r=EJR5C2SSXPJGB589ES8X&
I think it’s up to us to decide whether a particular book stays on the shelf or it needs to go. I am not in the habit of collecting books because of limited space. But I buy a lot of books for my kids and those books stay on the shelf for quite a long time due to nostalgic reasons. I think I will donate them when I am ready; they might still spark joy but that’s no reason not to part with the ‘outgrown’ books. The same logic applies to the books we read; they don’t necessarily have to spark joy; if it adds some sort of value then it’s okay. <3