Spring Cleaning @ Your Library
May 5th, 2015
Galina · Staff Recommendations
The snow has melted, the spring flowers are blooming, and it’s time to bring a feeling of openness and renewal back into your life…and onto your bookshelves.
Just as not every child’s crayon drawing, every pair of half-found mittens (what happened to that other one?), or every ten-year-old, half-empty spice container on your spice rack needs to be saved forever, it’s not necessary to keep all the books on your shelves.
Are you still holding on to any of these books?
- Books on diets and fitness programs that you gave up on years ago
- Novels that you’ve read and might re-read someday…but aren’t your favorite books ever, and are available through the library
- Old textbooks
- Out-of-date reference books
- The spine is broken, the pages are water-damaged, the cover has bite marks from your pets or children
- Any book that you put down after a few pages, promising yourself that you’ll read someday…but you’re pretty sure you won’t?
It may be time to sell or donate those books!
However, if books aren’t the problem (or are a problem you’re not willing to tackle quite yet!), perhaps you should check out a few of the following…
How to clean:
Spring Cleaning: The Spirit of Keeping Home, by Monica Nassif. Encourages people to turn spring cleaning into a ritual for taking care of the self, one practical step after another.
If that’s not thorough enough, however, try Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook: The Essential Guide to Caring for Everything in Your Home, by Martha Stewart. With seven hundred and fifty pages of tips, you’re sure to find information on how to maintain, clean, and make your home as safe and comfortable as possible.
How to get rid of clutter:
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, by Marie Kondo. A fun, quick, and very Japanese book about making a clean sweep of clutter by focusing on how it makes you feel.
Breathing Room: Open Your Heart by Decluttering Your Home, by Melva Green and Lauren Rosenfeld. Corresponds different rooms in your house with different “rooms” in your heart and what different types of clutter say about you.
The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essentials…in Business and in Life, by Leo Babauta. Leo Babauta, the author of the website Zen Habits, talks about a spring cleaning of the attitude, from writing emails to fitness.
It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff, by Peter Walsh. The organizational guru of TV show Clean Sweep and The Oprah Winfrey Show focuses on the vision of the life you want to live and helps get rid of the possessions that are choking the possibilities of achieving that vision.
How to get rid of toxic relationships:
He Did You A Favor: A Smart Girl’s Guide to Breaking Up, Waking Up, and Discovering the Gift of You, by Debra Rogers. A smart guide from a clinical psychologist about cleaning out your attitude after a breakup.
Dealing with the CrazyMakers in Your Life: Setting Boundaries on Unhealthy Relationships, by David Hawkins. How to escape other people’s chaos!
Fun spring-cleaning fiction:
Spring Cleaning: Featuring Jim Henson’s Sesame Street Muppets, by Pat Tornborg and Nancy W. Stevenson. An adorable kids’ spring-cleaning book with the Muppets.
Spring: An Alphabet Acrostic, by Steven Schnur and Leslie Evans. A kids’ book celebrating spring, with acrostic poems and illustrations.
The Spring Cleaning Murders, by Dorothy Cannell. A cozy murder mystery in the Ellie Haskell mystery series.
The Language of Spring: Poems for the Season of Renewal, edited by Robert Atwan. A selection of poems about spring, from Shakespeare to William Carlos Williams.
And…if you truly love putting things in order (or just want a laugh):
The Art of Cleanup: Life Made Neat and Tidy, by Ursus Wehrli. Swiss performance artist and writer Ursus Wehrli puts alphabet soup in order, organizes pine branches by needle size, sorts a kids’ ball pit by color, and more. Both strictly organized and lighthearted.
Remember, Harrison library is not currently accepting book donations (only due to our renovation!), but as soon as we reopen, we will bring back our green book donation box! We remain an excellent resource for all other organizational, spring cleaning, and I’m-on-a-cleaning-strike-and-I’m-going-to-read-now-so-there needs.