The Amazing and The Disappointing

Though by far my favorite genre is fiction, I occasionally enjoy dabbling in what I will call Home Books even though I know there is probably a more accurate and widely-recognized name for the category but I am both too lazy and too post-Saturday-afternoon-nap-brain-foggy to either look it up or to try to recall it under my own power. And obviously the same state is preventing me from avoiding babble and run-on sentences. Anyway, in case you don't know what I mean by Home Books, I mean the sort that gives decor advice, and maybe a little about cleaning and organizing too, with lots of pretty pictures of what my house will never look like.

Last year for Christmas my wonderful husband gave me this wonderful book: The Inspired Room by Melissa Michaels. I have literally read it through twice since then (and, the second time around, I was kind of amazed at the number of her suggestions I'd implemented in our house, either without quite realizing or without quite remembering the book was the source of the ideas). 

So when I came across Good Housekeeping's Simple Household Wisdom book while Christmas shopping this year, I felt sure it might be the new Inspired Room. 

I was wrong. 

Why, oh why didn't I listen to these Amazon reviewers? They're spot on. I did not come away from this book with a single idea of what I'd like to do in my house (unless you count getting an emergency generator so that next time our power goes out we still have water . . . not that that's either pretty or affordable). I didn't even really like most of the pictures.