Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik

Started: 15 April
Finished: 24 May
Pages: 252

Being interrupted is bad.  This isn't a long book, and it isn't a difficult book.  But for one reason or another my reading of it was interrupted a couple of times.   With a novel, that can mean feeling like I've wandered back into a conversation with strangers.   With a nonfiction book it just means a curiously disrupted perception of the the book's contents.

So, apologies to the book, and its author. It deserved better.

Stuff Matters belongs to the now-venerable tradition of nonfiction works begun by Much Depends on Dinner back in 1986.  The author begins with a simple everyday artefact -- in this case, a photo of himself sitting on a roof patio -- and devotes a chapter to exploring the history, sociology, and science of items within that artefact.  Mark Miodownik is a materials scientist, so his focus is on exploring the materials that make up everyday objects:  things like paper, concrete, chocolate, and china.

Stuff Matters won the 2014 Winton Prize for Science Books. The judges said "This brilliantly written book is a fresh take on material science that makes even the most everyday stuff exciting and interesting. It demonstrates just how creative and ingenious the human mind can be in its ability to incorporate them into our lives.”  Personally,  I think the primary reason Miodownik won, and the primary virtue of the book is how imaginative he is.  Each material he discusses is treated in a different way.  For example, he wrote a film script for the "plastic" chapter.

The only "but" to this book is that if you have a science background, you might find the contents a little bit basic.  Not that the science is less than rigourous--I definitely learned things--but that as a science reader you may have encountered some of the contents before in different contexts.  But hey,  I picked up fun facts that I was able to insert into conversation twice within a couple of weeks.  And the book is entertaining and engaging, and might just get you interested in the science of the "stuff" that surrounds us all.