Spark Joy.

Spark Joy is the follow up/companion volume to Marie Kondo's best selling The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up which I read in April. I wasn't totally convinced by Marie Kondo's philosophy and thought that a lot of her methods were impractical and a little too kooky for my lifestyle yet I was intrigued enough to pick this second book up. 

Spark Joy is presented as being a more practical guide to tidying and organising your home than the first book. Whilst it does contain examples of how to do so I wouldn't categorise it as a traditional guide book or a instructional book, much of the book is anecdotal, and much of it revisits and rehashes the ideas that were presented in the first book to reinforce the KonMarie method and philosophy.     

The cartoonish illustrations in this book were charming and very Japanese in feel but I felt that they were cute drawings rather than instructive illustrations.

I was expecting to read this and come away with some great ideas for organising my cupboards and belongings but I found that I already do a lot of the things that she suggests. A lot of the suggestions in this guide are things that I think of as being rather basic common sense: get rid of bulky packaging; store like articles together; get rid of old paperwork and so on... Maybe I am simply much better organised than I thought although I am by no means a 'neat freak'...  And there are still some things that she suggests that I find downright odd (soaking the labels off detergent bottles and tying a colourful ribbon around the bottle to make it more pleasing anyone?!?).

Spark Joy suggests that you should first read The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up in order to understand and use it's ideas accordingly, however, I felt that this book revisited the first one so often that it is unnecessary to read them both. If you want to be tidier and find out more about the KonMarie method then my suggestion would be that you read Spark Joy, I don't feel that there is a lot to be gained by reading both books and I found this one to be the more informative and interesting of the two.