No, Marie Kondo Is Right: Throw Away Your Books

I have yet to watch Marie Kondo’s Netflix series Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, but as I prepare to haul untold tons of my decaying possessions out of a storage unit this weekend, you can bet your boots I will. The trailer alone hit me like a Klonopin crushed up and snorted next to a tranquil stream—there’s just something about watching Kondo and her perfect bangs bound through people’s doors and liberate them from mountains of broken appliances and dirty sponges that puts my fraying nerves at ease.

But apparently there’s been some backlash against Kondo and her DEMAND that people throw their books. Judging by Twitter, there’s an episode in which Kondo razes entire neighborhoods searching for stray reading material she can light on a pyre:

IndieWire spoke to Kondo about whether she really wants to see authors strung up in town squares and the written word abolished altogether. “No,” she said, through interpreter Marie Iida.

“The question you should be asking is what do you think about books. If the image of someone getting rid of books or having only a few books makes you angry, that should tell you how passionate you are about books, what’s clearly so important in your life. If that riles you up, that tells you something you about that. That in itself is a very important benefit of this process.”

If the image of someone getting rid of books makes you angry, you have clearly never tried to pack up books for a move. Unless you’ve got entire rooms in your home dedicated to gym equipment or collectible chunks of concrete, books will undoubtedly be the biggest pain in the ass to drag from place to place. Yeah, getting them into the box is easy enough, but try picking that box up. How much joy will that hardbound copy of Telegraph Avenue bring you when you’re lying whimpering on the floor because you threw out your back? How much joy did it realistically even bring you the first time? This is conundrum I faced myself several months ago, so I know the answer is 1.5 joy units, which is one joy unit above a stale donut hole but 3.5 joy units below successfully cutting your own bangs.

Books are only good to have around if they A) hold sentimental value, B) have especially pleasing covers, or C) someone once wrote something funny on the inside flap. Otherwise, throw that shit to the curb, buy a Kindle, regret nothing.