Stuff and nonsense

We all have too much ‘stuff’. Indeed, there are hundreds of books written about accumulating and hoarding things we don’t actually need – or use or wear. (In contrast, one of the more shocking statistics I heard recently on Radio 4’s Today programme was that the average length of time we keep clothes is five weeks and the average number of times a piece of clothing is worn is seven.) Understanding Stuff; The Life of Stuff; The Secret Life of Stuff; Too Much Stuff; Stuffocation… are just a few of the books about ‘stuff’.

And now Marie Kondo has stepped in. This Japanese ‘organising consultant’ has suggested that we should limit the number of books we own – she keeps her own collection down to 30. This unsurprisingly has received a barrage of rebukes from readers and writers. The novelist Anakana Schofield tweeted that we should not listen to Kondo in relation to books: ‘Fill your apartment & world with them.’ A few days later she had more than 25,000 tweets in reply, most agreeing with her. And Susan Hill told the Times that she was suspicious of people telling us to tidy or de-clutter our lives. ‘You are either tidy or you are not. I am not. But even if I were, books don’t count.’ She wished that ‘small-minded, single issue, one-track people [would] stop bossing the rest of us about’. Hear hear.

I try to keep to the principle that for every book I buy I throw out another (or rather take to Oxfam) – but I usually fail. And reading the reviews inside this supplement I fear that my book piles will grow: Catherine Lacey’s Certain American States, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Written in History: Letters that Changed the World and Kassia St Clair’s The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History, to name just three. So don’t equate books with clutter: they do furnish a room, after all.