Since debuting her Netflix series Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, the titular organizational guru has found her mission to spark joy at the center of what one might call a literary controversy. After it was reported that Kondo herself thinks keeping only 30 books is the ideal number, Twitterers have been falling over themselves to assert that, actually, she will pry their books from their cold, dead hands.
Fortunately, as is so often the case, the thing you heard people freaking out about on Twitter isn’t really that much of a thing at all. According to an interview with Indiewire, Kondo says keeping 30 books is merely her ideal, and that your ideal can be anything you want it to be. It’s a free country and you’re an adult. “[I]t’s not so much what I personally think about books,” Kondo told Indiewire through her 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.”
