I recently finished reading Barchester Towers, the first novel I have read by the nineteenth-century English writer Anthony Trollope. And I had a strange reaction to it. I was intrigued enough, amused enough, to keep reading to the end. And yet at the same time I felt bored by it. Or perhaps more specifically, it Read More…
Category: Reading
Konmari: Papers
The second part of the ‘Books and Papers’ category is of course papers. That includes paper files, and any other paper stuff around the house. I thought this would be brief and breezy, but it turned into days of crushing agony. Read on. Files I tacked our household files on a Sunday afternoon. After implementing Read More…
Konmari: Books, Part 2
I finished yesterday’s post undecided about my academic books. Today, it’s time to tell how I dealtwith them. The problem, for me, with my academic books, is that they embody every type of value that Kondo describes: functional (I can use them), informational (they contain knowledge), emotional (I’m sentimental about them), and rarity (they are Read More…
Konmari: Books, Part 1
The next Konmari category includes books and papers. I started with books. Per the method, I pulled them off the shelves, and laid them out on the floor/table to go through one at a time. I followed Kondo’s four recommended divisions, but added a couple of my own to break things into logical groups: Books for Read More…
In Praise of Slow: A Book Review
Remember that I mentioned the slow food movement with reference to sourdough bread? It’s one of those things that I’d never heard of until recently, but once I heard it the first time suddenly it was cropping up everywhere. Hence, I read this book, which is about slow everything – the Slow movement, to be Read More…
Overdressed: A Book Review
I recently read Overdressed by Elizabeth L. Cline, a book which according to its subtitle is about the shockingly high cost of cheap fashion. From reading reviews beforehand, I knew it was a book about how the West buys its relatively inexpensive clothing, and the global systems which support the industry: about ‘fast fashion’ as the Read More…