Platitudinous bromides are the norm and cognitive fads are the fashion

Sometime this past weekend, I caught an interview on NPR of a Marie Kondo who is on some book promotion tour touting her tidying up book. NPR, not being one to shy away from a truly privileged and frivolous fad was all over this with hard hitting questions.

I am seeing in the Deseret News, Kondo has some very specific advice regarding books.

Kondo says the value of books lies in the information they contain and that “there is no meaning in them just being on your shelves.”

If you have a lot of unread books or books you hang onto in the belief you’ll reread them one day, Kondo recommends getting rid of them.

She says that as a result of practicing the KonMari method herself, she owns no more than 30 books. Kondo personally considers that number ideal.

In her book, Kondo writes that she once ripped relevant pages out of books that she found sparked some joy. It was an experiment that ultimately didn't work for her and resulted in those pages being discarded later.

As an owner of some 13,000 books, and I recognize that that is on the far end of the distribution (I am working hard on winnowing, I swear), I can say this about Kondo's advice - What absolute tosh!

She needs to read A.C. Doyle's Through the Magic Door.

However, separate from the issue of whether this is good or bad advice (of course it is bad advice) it beggars the imagination that a human should have such a poverty of curiosity or emotion that she might be fully sated by thirty books. I'll usually read portions of thirty books in a week. Imagine if that was all there were.

Imagine a mind so constrained that thirty books served the maximum need. I am afraid I don't have enough imagination to comprehend that. But that constrained mind does kind of make her the perfect guest of NPR where platitudinous bromides are the norm and cognitive fads are the fashion.