I really don't know how to classify this book: a personal history? Essay? The ever-present catch-all of general nonfiction? Philosophy?

It truly is a little bit of everything. Somehow, the work sucked me in, and again. Thinking about the quotidian objects in our lives in a new way challenged my view of my own day to day life. The impact of those objects may be positive or negative, but Kelleher's biggest success is making us even consider them. I can't really say I've thought too much about the mirrors in my home, other than from the standpoint of vanity. However, the author is able to take it deeper. The meditations on gloss and glitter made me think about the ways in which our outside self project an argument, even if we may not intrinsically thinking about it. Even the chapter on silk (humorously entitled "Women and worms") made me rethink fabric as well.

As a cisgender, heterosexual male, I even found a lot to ruminate about. The implicit argument that I picked up on is that there is are deeper structures to our society that may not be noticeable without some reflection. You don't have to wear silk to understand it

I absolutely loved reading this book. I was completely drawn into the topic and could not stop reading it.

I was so excited about this book. It sounded tailor made for me and I’ve followed the author online for a long time. I love the history of objects and reading about our personal connections to them.

I just didn’t really enjoy it. I wish she had decided to write a memoir about her mixed feelings about these objects with just a tiny bit of history or done a really well-researched history book instead. Instead we get her sort of rambling about the history of the object without really delving in because she covers hundreds and even thousands of years in a handful of pages and then shoehorns in some connection to herself,

I also thought some of her examples and tangents were odd and not fleshed out enough.

For example:

In a single 20-page chapter she discusses: a friend’s story about her family in WWII era Germany, her own pre-WWII family’s immigration from Germany, her mother’s china collection, the fall of popularity of collecting sets of expensive dishes, china vs porcelain, the Silk Road, the possible cross border history of blue and white vases/dinnerware, Madame de Pompadour’s love of pink, the vegan refusal of bone china, the rise of the woman’s magazine and the middle class, Queen Victoria’s drug habit, the opium trade and the role of the British empire, how plates are made, the German love of porcelain and Himmler’s involvement in a porcelain factory, a recent Seattle ceramic artist who turned out to be a Holocaust denier, the desire for whiteness in dinnerware and elsewhere, the emotional associations with color, doll faces and how they possibly influenced a feeling of white supremacy in the 18th century, her discomfort in discussing whiteness, the specter of Eva Braun’s tableware despite its “cottagecore” look, contrasts a restaurant plate and a chipped Fiestaware in a dorm room (a fairly expensive and collectible dish so I’m not sure why she used to to convey shabbiness?), her personal collections and religion and conservatism around ritualized events, how most of her collection is from Europe and not dissimilar to Eva Braun’s dish, she talks about how she could branch out into other dishware and how but she doesn’t want to, another woman’s newsletter and he thoughts around home and growing up in the LDS church, some discussion about mothers and the home. All of the chapters are like this.

It could have worked with some detail and some editing—each of these ideas could have been a book on their own—but it needed up being a bit of a stream of consciousness mess. As the book stands it’s not really a full memoir or history of these objects so why does it exist? Why did they chose this format?

One of the biggest reading disappointments I've had in years.