Home Comforts is a great book for anyone who's clueless about keeping house, especially if you demand to know the reasons for the tasks involved.

The opening chapters introduce you to the idea of housekeeping and how to begin. She offers sample routines, task lists, etc. And she doesn't make you feel bad if you don't or can't manage everything she recommends.

Later chapters dig down into the specifics of various aspects of keeping your house looking and feeling like a home, and they are more like chapters in a reference text. You could read all the way through this book, but it's also a good resource for when you have specific questions.

Highly recommended for my generation. ( )

Interesting academic take on a pretty unacademic topic. Very long, though! ( )

Aggh, this book really stressed me out! Like many women of my generation I didn't learn much about housekeeping and now I need to do it...but this book wasn't helpful to me. It made me feel completely overwhelmed. I think I need something a little more modern and realistic. ( )

I bought this from blog recommendations; it is the most comprehensive and well-written book of this genre.
The author's style is casual, witty, and non-nonsense effective. ( )

worth it for the section "When is Good Enough Good Enough". Mendelson's intent in this book is not to make us feel guilty or compulsive about Keeping House, but how to do it in a way that is effective.