I am as much of a layperson as you can get in terms of chemistry, and I really enjoyed this book.
What the book really did for me was to make me start thinking and becoming more curious about the world around us. I have been an avid reader for years, but I really needed this book to kind of punch me in the face and get me back to basics. As a true 21st century youngster I'd been trying to "find myself". Trying to find some kind of meaning to this absurdly complex endeavour we call "life". Only now did I realize: My head's been too much in the clouds.
And can I blame myself? Who can seriously tell themselves they're an intellectual without reading Marx, and who can say they've understood Marx without understanding Hegel, and who can say they 've really understood Hegel's dialectic without understanding the historical background he was writing in.. and so and so forth.
In the middle of all this, I became like the proverbial intellectual gym bro, and I forgot to breathe as I was "lifting" my mind. I was just trying to "lift" everything all at once, without really stopping to think about what I was doing.
I stopped thinking about essentials such as "why don't oil and water mix?", "why are semiconductors such a big deal?", "why do we salt roads during winter?". In short, I'd avoided the real world. I took the real world of the 21st century for granted. It was offering me all this awesome stuff. I was imbibing the collective genius of hundreds of generations of hard-working men and women, without sparing a thought to how much work actually lay behind it all. Here I was, with all sorts of complex answers to age-old questions at my fingertips, and I was not even making use of this awesome opportunity.
So yes, I am thankful that I finally started scratching the surface of the natural sciences after a long hiatus. I really needed it. And this book was the perfect gateway drug to get started on the heavier stuff.