Blogging for Books

Recently I discovered the site Blogging For Books via a local friend's blog.  She received a popular book for free in exchange for an honest review on her blog!  Uhhhh, SIGN ME UP!

When you sign up, you get to select one book, which they send you, free of charge.  Your job is to read it and write up a post!

I selected Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston.

The title spoke to me.  Not only because of the feng shui part, but the "clear your clutter" part too.  It IS the year of the purge around here.  So I thought it would bring my curiosity of the art of feng shui and my decluttering game together.  Feng shui has always interested me.  I really didn't know much about it, but was ready to learn more.

I'll be honest.  I didn't learn much about feng shui the way I was hoping to.  I was hoping I'd learn the art of staging a home based on the principles of FS while keeping it clutter-free, but instead it focused on figuring out the "why" behind clutter in many areas of life (even emotional clutter) and the negative way clutter can impact your life.

I knew feng shui was sort of out-there.  Based on energies and spirituality.  Some of that I can get behind.  Some I cannot.  The notion that a home has "imprints" of previous tenants that can negatively or positively effect your home life is one I am not sure I can subscribe to.

Another area that the book really focused on was identifying clutter areas.  I guess people can really struggle with that.  To me, clutter is obvious.  So the large section devoted to that topic was, for me, unnecessary.

Overall, I felt like out of the three parts this book is divided into, Part 1 was the only part I really enjoyed.  Chapter 8 included diagrams of the part of feng shui I was interested in, how a home is divided into zones and how those zones can impact different aspects of your life.  It just didn't go deep enough.  I was left wanting more out of this section of the book.

In the end, I couldn't go into a room and stage it, clutter-free, using feng shui.  Which is what I'd been expecting to learn.

Nonetheless, it was an easy read.  It did make me think about "why" I hang on to things.  And it did make me eye roll more than once.

Now I can look forward to selecting another book though!  Maybe I'll shoot for fiction.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for review.