Compared to Kurlansky's book about paper, which I also read this year, this book is a bit harder to read. It has a central theme, paper, but each chapter reads more like a separate essay or article and some of the topics are not as paper related as others. Still, each chapter was interesting, even the ones that were a bit more rambling. And, for paper enthusiasts this would be a fun read, with lots of random trivia on all sorts of tangentially related subjects, as well as about paper. ( )

I felt impatient about the introduction and the first chapter, but once Basbanes really gets going talking about the history of papermaking, I was hooked. I have to admit that I don't get as jazzed about currency or bureaucracy as some of the later chapters demand, but on the whole a very engaging history with bits I loved to pieces. ( )

I found this book interesting but hard to come back to. I could see it more as a college student's research source than what my 2015 self attempted to use as entertainment during his first year of bachelor's degree life. Both Nicholas and Mark Kurlansky's "Paper" are quite long, for paper is apparently older than several well known countries and even empires. I may give it a re-read now that I am done with school. Perhaps it would behoove me to try this tome as an audio book. ( )

I had high hopes for this book. After all, the origins, making, uses and history of paper should be extremely interesting? Not this book. This book is disjointed and jumps around from topic to topic, most of which are only vaguely related to paper. It is a combination of travelogue, lengthy interviews, biographies, paragraphs of credentials, random facts, selective historical anecdotes, excessive (irrelevant in my opinion) historical detail about the people and places that have had something to do with the making, manufacturing, researching, storing, repairing, collecting, selling, buying, or using paper.

However, even after ploughing though all this detail, the book somehow fails to get to the core of paper - more in-depth paper making processes, the science, physical properties and technology of paper and paper making would have been nice. The author appears to be more interested in the idea of paper, not the paper itself.

All in all, I found the book to be rather tedious, with the occasional interesting bits.








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Another journalist's book piling thousands of factoids in the hope of getting a compelling story - but ending with just a big pile. (I stopped reading soon, it was harrowing.) ( )