10 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2020
SINCE MARCH,a lot of us have
been confined under various
forms of house arrest, watching
talking heads on television who
are also in their homes. This state
of affairs gives way to my new
game, Fantasy Home: It’s fantasy
football, only with window treat-
ments. Currently on my team: the
kitchen of Claire McCaskill, the
den of Michael Beschloss, and the
living room of the pineapple
enthusiast Steve Schmidt, partic-
ularly if he throws in his Lab and
his Bernese mountain dog.
So with all of this focus on the
domestic, what better time to dive
into books that help us create
better homes, or a better life in
our homes. Hey, move over.
You’re hogging the bed.“WHAT DOES ‘HOME’mean, re-
ally?” asks Kate Peers, the author
of MINDFUL THOUGHTS AT HOME:
Finding Heart in the Home (Leaping
Hare Press, 160 pp., $9.99) and
self-proclaimed social media
guru. “While your home is a
statement to all who visit, more
importantly, it influences your
mood and emotions. The vision of
a beautiful house means some-
thing different to everyone, so it
is important to be confident with
your choices and content in what
you have around you.” The idea of
“Mindful Thoughts” is that by
commenting on various aspects of
the home — noticing, appreciat-
ing, living in the moment — we
will figure out what makes us
happy and what doesn’t. “Just
take a look around your space
now; don’t try to force any reac-
tions, but see how you feel,” she
says. “What do you appreciate?
Maybe the smooth, green leaves
on a house plant or the comfort of
a pillow get your shoulders un-
knotting.” The idea here is to
think not only how something
looks, but how it feels, and how it
makes you feel. This works really
well for those with good taste. If
you don’t have good taste, you
may end up going to a store when
you’re tipsy and buying a $2,
swivel chair because it came in afabric called Cuddle. And then
you have a furry chair in your
bedroom glaring at you, matching
nothing, a symbol of all your bad
decisions. That’s where mindful-
ness got me.WHY WOULD ANYONEneed a book
like Erin Zammett Ruddy’s THE
LITTLE BOOK OF LIFE SKILLS: Deal
With Dinner, Manage Your Email, Make
a Graceful Exit, and 152 Other Expert
Tricks (Grand Central, 272 pp., $20)?After all, if you want to know the
easiest way to, say, put a duvet
cover on a duvet, you’ve got
Google, right? Sure, except that
there are pages and pages of
methods, you’re not sure which is
best, and while you’re doing your
research — oh look, there’s a
camel and a warthog who are
best friends! And off you go, until
you’ve watched 40 adorable vid-
eos and forgotten what you were
looking for.
In the firm belief that there is
sometimes one great way to do
something, Ruddy, a magazine
journalist with a deep pool of
experts on speed dial, has col-
lected what she considers the
best. She organizes chapters
around challenges we may face in
a typical day, many of them in the
home — from how to get out of
bed (no snooze button, and imme-
diately drink a glass of water
since you’ve lost a lot overnight)
to setting yourself up for a good
night’s sleep — which includesthis brilliant if daunting piece of
advice: Escort your phone out of
the room. Each tip has a how-to,
an expert source and an explana-
tion.
PS. I won’t explain the best way
to put on a duvet cover, but suf-
fice it to say that is not the way
I’ve been doing it my entire life,
which involves throwing the
duvet cover over my head while
clutching the duvet, and then sort
of shimmying out like a king
cobra molting. Lesson learned.IF THE PHRASE“paper-organizing
retreat” makes you breathe a
little heavier, boy, do I have the
book for you. Lisa Woodruff,
author of THE PAPER SOLUTION:
What to Shred, What to Save, and How
to Stop It From Taking Over Your Life
(Putnam, 320 pp., $18),hosts these
retreats and people drive across
state lines, some of them in trucks
weighted down with loads of
paper destined for Woodruff’s
industrial shredder, to learn ev-
erything there is to know about
what to do with those piles that
have accumulated.
Some of us have a complicated
relationship with paper. “Hey,
why don’t you just scan every-
thing into your computer?” has
an obvious reply: “Hey, why don’t
you jump off this cliff ?” But
Woodruff understands that, say,
getting rid of tax returns from 20
years ago can be extremely emo-
tional. She’s been there. “Regret,
grief, condemnation, judgment,
stress, worry, hopelessness —
these are all emotions I experi-
enced in going through my own
big purge.” She counsels improve-
ment, not perfection. “Organizing
is a form of giving ourselves
grace,” she adds.
Woodruff is not wrong. I pay
$50 a month to store all the paper
I can’t throw out. But! Thanks to
her, I bought enormous plastic
bins for my letters — every holi-
day card, including the ones from
P.R. companies and insurance
brokers; every word of affection,
including the racy notes from I
can’t remember whom, maybe
someone I dated, maybe someone
I never met who answered an ad I
put in The Village Voice in 1988.
Improvement not perfection,
people. 0A Very, Very, Very Fine House
HELP DESK/SELF-IMPROVEMENT/BY JUDITH NEWMAN
JUDITH NEWMANis the author of “To
Siri With Love: A Mother, Her Autis-
tic Son and the Kindness of Ma-
chines.”NISHANT CHOKSI“THERE IS A LOT
OF ERUDITION IN
THIS ANALYSIS
ofmoneyasaformof
storytelling.Allmoney
dependsonthefaithof
thosewhouseit.
Andlikeanypowerful
belief,moneycanbe
exploitedbysometo
manipulatethemindsof
others.”—WALL STREET JOURNAL“A MUST READ”
— NOMI PRINS, author ofCollusion:
How Central Bankers Rigged the World
andAll the Presidents’ Bankers“AN IMPORTANT BOOK”
—DAVID S. REYNOLDS, winner of the
Bancroft Prize for American History and
author ofAbe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times“WITH WELL-DESERVED
AUTHORITY AND
A PLEASING
NARRATIVE FLAIR
Kaufmanexploresthe
originsofmoney—whywe
haveit,whereitcamefrom,
andwhatitmeanstoday.”
—WILLIAM D. COHAN,New York Times
bestselling author ofHouse of Cards
andThe Last Tycoons“Fascinating...Anirreverent,
grand,andcaptivating
historytourofmoney:
whatitisandwhatitdoes
toeachandallofus.”
GEORGE PAPACONSTANTINOU,former finance minister of Greece
and author ofGame Over: The Inside Story of the Greek CrisisOTHER PRESS OTHERPRESS.COM