The best books to rock your world and make you fall in love with stones

Rooted in autobiography, Levi’s exquisite collection of interlinked stories teases out the relationship between the human and mineral worlds.

Our idioms habitually position stone as the antithesis to life – we might describe a corpse as ‘stone dead’ or a machinelike bureaucrat as ‘stone hearted’.

Levi instead looks to a symbiotic relationship, in which the raw crags of the Alps teach fortitude, access to rare minerals provide a military advantage, and the ability to read the secrets written in stone offers a route to riches.

In The Periodic Table, exploitation of the elements always comes at a cost – for everything the Earth yields, it takes something in return. 

A whole book about a single stone? Whaaaaat?

Sure, The Planet in a Pebble is usually filed under ‘popular science’ but with a premise like that, we could also consider it a work of experimental literature.

Zalasiewicz picks up a pebble on a Welsh beach – humble, rounded grey slate intersected by a seam of white quartz – which starts him on a journey back over 4.5 billion years, looking at the minerals of early Earth.

We watch elements of our pebble progress through the rock cycle, eroding from igneous rock, slowly settling in a bacteria-rich bed of sediment within the early ocean before re-lithifying, metamorphosing under intense heat and pressure as mountains are formed by the movement of continental plates, to at last be exposed again and splintered from its mother rock by the force of wind and waves.

Raffles explores geology through both a historic and an autobiographical lens.

We might understand the ‘unconformities’ of the title as both unconventional geological formations and members of Raffles’s own family (though I imagine he might question my urge to distinguish between the two.)

The book is episodic, and follows Raffles on his travels to sites of geological and personal significance.

Throughout he also draws out the long history of exploitation bound up in our relationship to the mineral realm, including the removal of iron-rich meteorites from indigenous communities in the arctic circle, and the forced labour of the Glimmerwerke – mica splitting workshops – at Theresienstadt ghetto during the Second World War.

In my book I describe geology as a storytelling science – Raffles is something closer to a poet.

Sontag’s historic novel focusses on two great romances: the one between Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson and Lady Emma Hamilton, and the other between her husband Sir William Hamilton and the volcano Vesuvius.

Hamilton is the titular ‘volcano lover’ (he also dallied with Etna) who documented the fluctuating moods of the crater with attentive devotion.

He is a fascinating figure – an eighteenth-century diplomat, collector, and connoisseur, he worked at a time when the foundations of modern science were being laid down.

Hamilton’s observations of Vesuvius and the flaming sulphur fields around Naples were recorded in the beautiful Campi Phlegraei.

European men of his time were driven to document, catalogue, name, and impose order on the world, often in a deliberate effort to distance themselves from natural religions and animistic beliefs that prevailed in territories exploited in the colonial era.

Sontag describes Hamilton caught in the balance between the worlds of science he aspires to and the suggestions of diabolical magic wafting from the volcano.

Fortey is a literary, opinionated, and very engaging science writer.

One of the foundational books for my book was a geological walk across the Great Britain called The Hidden Landscape which was a revelation when I first read it (I can’t believe it’s now 30 years old!).

I’m a keen walker and know many of the landscapes he described in the book – learning about the rocks far beneath my feet, the forces that had formed them and the impact they had on the history of each region really transformed my relationship to the landscape.

For anyone looking for a global perspective, his more recent book Earth: An Intimate History is also an excellent and illuminating read.