Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones

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From the elegance of emerald moons to humble fossilized feces, from violent lunar origin stories to simple earthen pigments, Lapidarium is richly abundant with interesting facts, poignant stories, and weird anecdotes about stones. Hettie tells us short stories about each stone: from the paleolithic to the Playstation War, and from Elisabeth I to Imelda Marcos.

We hear of incredible discoveries, greed, curses and forgeries alongside the geography and geology of their origins.

I found myself locked out of the house with nothing to amuse myself with, no phone to play with, and a three hour wait for the next person with keys to show up. Each essay isn't actually about a stone, it's a niche tale about people with a connection to the stone in question, and it's the people that the essay focuses on. Lapidarium weaves the surprising stories of the 60 most fascinating stones into a rich cultural history: from the red ground hematite pigment our cave-painting ancestors used and the mystery behind the tuff Easter Island heads, to the columbite that caused the Playstation War and the intriguing history of the cairngorm crystal ball, to the scandalous story of Flint Jack, whose forgeries still populate many museums in the UK today. Upcoming books include How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (Lund Humphries, September 2022) and Lapidarium (John Murray, London, October 2022/ Penguin, NY, March 2023). Amongst these essays exploring how human culture has formed stone and, conversely, the roles stone has played in forming human culture, one will read of the Meat-Shaped Stone of Taiwan, a piece of banded jasper that resembles a tender piece of mouth-watering braised pork belly, There is the soap opera melodrama of Pele’s Hair, golden strands of volcanic glass, spun into hair-fine threads by volcanic gasses and blown across the landscape.

Find out how a Greek monster created coral, moon rock explains the history of Earth’s only satellite and obsidian inspired the world’s favourite computer game. I wanted to love it – I think there should be loads of books encouraging us to reconnect with the natural world, to come away with some general knowledge about our planet and our surroundings and how it's shaped human civilisation at large.

This book talks a lot about the history of stones, how they came to be, their presence in geological and human history, and culture. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. The selections struck me as arbitrary, despite the author’s explanations as to why certain things belonged in one chapter rather than another.