Kindle book 24 was Paraphernalia: The Curious Live of Magical Things by Professor Steven Connor.
I liked this book a lot. These bits speak for themselves:
"When we speak of an object – from ob-, opposite or against, and –iacere, to throw – our word evokes something that is thrown or thrust up against us. The word ‘object’ seems to assert the existence of that which stands apart, and has no part of us."
"The meditations on objects I offer here will indeed often suggest that they can be seen as what in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe would have been called ‘emblems’, allegories of human life, implying pocket homilies on love, time, hope, error, striving and death. As such, they give us work to do as well as being merely available for us to work on. And yet, their power comes entirely from us."
"A teacup asks to be picked up by the handle; a brandy glass invites one to cradle it, tender as a dove, from underneath; a shoe hints pointedly at a particular kind of toe-first, Cinderella insertion; a table spreads its flat expanse generously for banquet or billiards; a chair irresistibly proposes that one lower oneself into it backwards. Such objects seem to have us, or certain parts of us, imaged in them."
"Magical objects in this sense are always playthings, things that seem not to give some specific instruction as to their use, like the labels saying ‘eat me’ and ‘drink me’ on objects in Wonderland, but rather seem to say, ‘play with me: try to make out what I might be good for’. Magical things invite a kind of practical rêverie, a kind of floating but intent circling through or playing with possibilities, a following out of their implied reach. Magical objects are such stuff as dreams are made on. They afford reflection on their affordances."
"We play with such objects as we do with all playthings, for an entirely circular reason – namely, to find out how much play (in the sense of give, stretch or variability) they may be found to possess. Sometimes, the action of taking an object to its limits will result in its being tested to destruction. Eventually, the paper clip snaps. Perhaps all play has at its horizon the death of the plaything. When we put something to work, we use it for a particular purpose. In play, we seek not so much to use things as to use them up."
"What prevents us relapsing into a purely animal or mechanical existence are precisely those unnecessary things that are the tiny, persisting proof of our existence, by which I mean our defining unnecessariness, the fact that there is no particular need for us to have arisen at all."
"Sausages and saveloys were sometimes known in the nineteenth century as ‘bags of mystery’."
"its sheer all-in-one suits would be secured by zips and velcro (which would fasten diagonally, slashing diagonality being the infallible sign of futurity’s intolerance of fussy delay)"
"Buttons, like keys, are part of an economy of lost belongings, and glow glumly with the melancholy sense that the fate of things is not so much to fall apart as to come undone or get lost."
"The button became the image of the convertibility of scales, the possibility of setting in train or discontinuing a massive, complex and ramifying set of operations by a single elementary motion, one that is almost indistinguishable from pointing. The button was the proof of the new dominion of the miniature, the maximal condensed into the minimal. The button allows the concentration of will and purpose into a single form, a single, simple gesture, and the closing of the gap between intention and action."
"The reading space of the newspaper is much more diversified, animated by the order and quality of its reading, than the uniform space of a book page. The eye is not enjoined to move steadily through the newspaper’s text, but skips, scoots, circles and skids fly-wise around the page. As Nicholson Baker has put it, newspapers ‘have a visual exorbitance, a horizon-usurping presence’"
