One of the things that I’d always intended to do with my blog was make notes about what I’ve been reading, because it’s a rare writer who isn’t a voracious reader.
I usually have at least two books in progress: one fiction, one non-fiction. Fiction by my bed, non-fiction in the bathroom. (I find it easier to read plotless books one or two pages at a time 
Last week I finished Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette (Random House; 2004; ISBN0-8129-7142-6)
My favorite kind of non-fiction is wryly written and makes connections between things that I wouldn’t have connected. Color is very much one of my favorites.
At heart, it’s a collection of ten essays, one each for ochre, black/brown, white, and the seven colors of Newton’s rainbow. So, right from the start, there’s something unexpected, because I always thought there were six colors in the rainbow: red, yellow, orange, green, blue, and violet. But, no — Newton, who, let’s be honest, thought of himself as an alchemist and only did “science” when the alchemy didn’t work, had a thing for the number seven: seven planets, seven days of the week, seven musical notes. Okay, he was wrong about the planets and the notes, but when he looked at his prism’s light he was pre-determined to see seven colors: red, yellow, orange, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
Which was nice, because seven colors gave Finlay the go-ahead to write two blue essays, one that ranges from an unfinished portion of one of Michaelangelo’s earlier (and less successful) paintings to a remote region of Afghanistan right before the Taliban blew up the thousand-year-old statues of Buddha and a second one about indigo, the plant.
It seems that Finlay’s day job is (or was, at least) as the Arts and Travel writer for the South China Morning Post and the essays mix travelogues and art history with some thoughtful commentary on the role that particular color have played in various cultures.
The ochre essay that begins the book starts off collecting rocks in Northern Italy, but it’s mostly about Australia and the complex role that color plays in Aborigine culture. The black/brown essay ranges from the Lascaux caves to the Pencil Museum in Keswick, UK, to the difficulty of making a truly permanent black ink to a recipe for creating mommia, a brown color much favored by 17th century painters, from a water-logged (and preferrably red-headed, young, and male) corpse.
White is a story of poison and impermanence.
Red is mostly about bugs–and reminded me of hiking here in Lake County a few years ago. When you think of Florida, the plant that comes to mind is a palm tree, or maybe citrus, but that day I found myself surrounded by prickly-pear cacti. My hiking partner cut off a “leaf” to show me a light-colored, blistery thing attached to it which leaked bright red liquid when he pinched it between his fingers: Cochineal — Spanish Red: the dyestuff that revolutionized the way Europeans dressed in the 17th century and remains one of the few reds that the FDA allows in foods. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Speculators have been trying to get-rich-quick around here for centuries and cochineal plantations were just another way to lose money in Florida.
Orange is about amber and varnishes and the travels of Giovanni Leonardo da Martinengo, an exiled Sephardic Jew and lute-maker, who wound up teaching his craft to a pair of Italian brothers by the name of Amati in the Italian city of Cremona.
Yellow is another tale of poison (the best colors, one quickly learns, are usually deadly), a failed quest for pigments distilled from the urine of sacred cows, and fields of crocuses.
Green ranges from President George Washington’s dining room to Emperor Yizong’s dining room.
The blues I’ve mentioned, and violet is an essay that starts in Phoenicia and winds up on Mexico’s western coast.
None of which captures the breadth of Findlay’s travels in her search for color or her skill in weaving her research into a charming narrative.
Look Who’s Talking…