ROY G. BIV: An Exceedingly Surprising Book About Color (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
A very interesting book. I feel like I learned a lot of trivia, but I have two issues. One, it needed to be at least twice as long. While I was reading, I kept picking up my iPhone to consult Wikipedia and find out more about the shorter blurbs. I suppose you could view this as a good thing, as the book definitely inspired me to seek out more knowledge, but i would've appreciated more depth of information. Secondly, I found the page references on the side of each page to be very repetitive and I think they would be much more helpful if they were actual footnotes that added little tidbits of info relating to the subject matter on the page. Otherwise, Roy G Biv is a very intelligently written, exceedingly fascinating read. This book is beautifully -- almost poetically -- written and full of interesting factoids about color. The format is unusual. In fact, the book is as much formatting as it is about content. Chapters are arranged by color, and each is introduced with an intrigue-building block diagram that overviews its content. Within a chapter, each topic is only 1-2 paragraphs in length, with certain phrases underlined in color to direct the reader to related material "advertised" in the side margins. Chapters also contain well-selected quotations about color in bright graphics. So, after saying all those complimentary things, why didn't I give this book a higher rating? Well, once again, on GoodReads we give ratings not necessarily for the quality of the book but for the quality of our experience as a reader. And, in my case, the book simply wasn't what I had hoped for or expected.I had heard about ROY G. BIV on NPR soon after enjoying several great podcasts (eg, NPR's Radio Lab) about color. So my interest was peaked even before hearing about this book, and I was eager to learn more. But this book didn't offer the detail I wanted. Instead, it's chock full of even more soundbytes -- more starting points rather than the in-depth stories behind color and its significance.Two other aspects I appreciate and yet were issues for me:1. The whole idea of writing in little factoids is very contemporary; it fits with the age of Twitter and Facebook posts and bulleted PowerPoint slides. I get that. And yet, for me, it's so unsatisfying to sit down with a book written in that style, because I expect something different from a book. I especially found the side margins distracting -- at first, I felt obligated to read the side margin every time I came across an underlined phrase. But these were repetitive, sometimes referring you back to the page you had just flipped. So was this book meant to be picked up to a random page rather than read through? The book came across as an advertisement for itself rather than the actual book.2. I appreciate how much research this book required, and I commend the author for picking such interesting information from the wealth of data she must have come across. And I love how comfortably the content crosses cultures. BUT when one famous story with which I'm very familiar is incorrectly described, it affects the credibility of all the material with which I'm not familiar. Case in point: on page 43, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego do not "perish in molten orange style in a furnace." The whole point of that story is that they DON'T perish in the furnace.
What do You think about ROY G. BIV: An Exceedingly Surprising Book About Color (2013)?
Super fun book of color factoids, well laid out and entirely engaging.
—jekipp54
a book of color trivia more than anything else.
—Lisa1133
Caveat: I read it because I also wrote it!
—bluebrolly
