What's your favorite color?

Color: A Natural History of the Palette ~ by Victoria Finlay, 2002, history, 468 pages (in the print edition)

In this vivid and captivating journey through the colors of an artist’s palette, Victoria Finlay takes us on an enthralling adventure around the world and through the ages, illuminating how the colors we choose to value have determined the history of culture itself.  How did the most precious color blue travel all the way from remote lapis mines in Afghanistan to Michelangelo’s brush?  What is the connection between brown paint and ancient Egyptian mummies?  Why did Robin Hood wear Lincoln green?  Finlay explores the physical materials that color our world, such as precious minerals and insect blood, as well as the social and political meanings that color has carried through time.

Roman emperors used to wear togas dyed with a purple color that was made from an odorous Lebanese shellfish — which probably meant their scent preceded them.  In the eighteenth century, black dye was called logwood and grew along the Spanish Main.  Some of the first indigo plantations were started in America by a seventeen-year-old girl named Eliza.  And the popular van Gogh painting "White Roses" at Washington’s National Gallery had to be renamed after a researcher discovered that the flowers were originally done in a pink paint that had faded nearly a century ago.

This book is full of extraordinary people, events, and anecdotes.  This intrepid journalist travels on a donkey along ancient silk trade routes; with the Phoenicians sailing the Mediterranean in search of a special purple shell that garners wealth, sustenance, and prestige; and with modern Chilean farmers breeding and bleeding insects for their viscous red blood.  The colors that craft our world have never looked so bright.

The author says, "I first became fascinated with the story of colours when I was eight, and my father showed me a stained glass window in Chartres cathedral and explained how the blue glass was made 800 years ago and we couldn't make it like that any more.  Many years later I gave up my day job as Arts editor at the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong — where I lived for 12 years — to write Color: A Natural History of the Palette.  In the course of my research, I travelled to the underground opal churches of outback Australia, interviewed retired pearl fishermen in Scotland, crawled through Cleopatra's long-deserted emerald mines, climbed the "blue mountains" of Afghanistan where Michelangelo's ultramarine paint came from, learned about medieval stained glass and tried my hand at gem cutting in the dusty Sri Lankan city where Marco Polo once bartered for sapphires."

Okay, I was hooked, so I bought the book for my Kindle (it's not as heavy to hold that way).  When I noticed this is a "big book" of 468 pages, I decided to join Sue of the Book by Book blog in her Big Book Summer Challenge.  Here are the rules for me, as a blogger:

• Anything 400 pages or more qualifies as a big book.
• The challenge will run from Memorial Day weekend (starting May 28 this year) through Labor Day weekend (Labor Day is September 6 this year).
• Choose one or two or however many big books you want as your goal. Wait, did you get that?  You only need to read 1 book with 400+ pages this summer to participate!
• Sign up on the Big Book Summer Challenge page.
• If you have a blog, write a post to kick things off.
• Write a post to wrap up at the end, listing the big books you read during the summer.
• You can write progress posts if you want to and/or reviews of the big books you've read, but you don't have to.

I'm only committing to this one book for now, but if I happen to read another BIG book this summer, I'll add it to my list.