Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones

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She weaves stone through human history showing us how we gave different types of stone the power of royalty and worship.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Aside from all of that I’m delighted I was locked out because it’s an incredibly interesting book and one I was genuinely sad to finish a couple of days later. Hettie Judah breaks her book down by types of stones into these categories;Stones and Powers, Sacred Stones, Stones and Stories, Stone Technology, Shapes in Stones and Living Stones. Her stories also bear out the tragic pattern of so much engagement with the natural world - what begins in wonder leads to greed andrapacious extraction. We are told of incredible creations and decorations, large and small, carved from these prized stones.This randomness does make it more interesting as amethyst is followed by cairngorm and tuff precedes turquoise. A fascinating history of stones and the surprising ways they have - and continue to - shape, influence and inspire us, in a beautiful volume. The moment I stopped reading, it literally left my head and I couldn't tell you a single thing that had been mentioned so far.

The content was also very interesting and fun to read, the stones really came to life through 2-3 page stories of their history.I would have appreciated photographs of some of the wonders described - it would have been handier than having to use Google. While the diversity of the stones and the geology are fascinating, what I particularly enjoyed was learning about the ways in which humans have used these stones, from the Malachite Room in Russia’s Winter Palace to the giant stone Medusa heads in the underground cisterns in Istanbul to the ‘meat stone’ that draws crowds in Taipei. Then electricity is brought up again (without the connection back to elektron) and we are taken through a jarring summary of the discovery of amber's properties with a profusion of unexplained quotes. And though I read this book straight through from start to finish, this is absolutely the sort of bibliomantic tome that one might flip through at random, choosing a chapter based on mood or whim: learn a weird rock fact, let it lodge in your brain like a wayward pebble in your shoe, and allow it to guide your energies for the day.