Pions to quarks Book

What did I think? What was I thinking when I removed this from the library shelf? I have read some interesting stuff recently on this subject, stimulated from my interest in Astronomy. However, Martin & Shaw's 'Particle Physics' is a textbook of first degree level for the pie eyed University undergrad.
Like a scatty Red Setter I bounded into Chapter One:-Some Basic Concepts only to find the ice on Happy Valley Pond was rather too thin. In an instant I was spinning like a boson into some uncontrolled pirouette through the standard model of particles, unable to tell a hadron from a quark. By page 3 I hit the Relativistic wave equations and the ice cracked. Still floundering through Chapter One I hit the delights of Feynman diagrams...which is when my body mass index reached cold dark matter.
John Updike gave some slight relief to the leptons, quarks and hadrons with his little ditty on electron neutrinos...
Neutrinos, they are very small,
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.

Through all this mush, I still hold some fascination! Take free quarks for example. Free quarks have never been seen, despite many experiments to find them. Free quarks would be most readily identified via their fractional electric charge. One consequence of this is that the lightest quark would be stable, as electric charge has to be conserved in any decay. In matter, such stable quarks would give rise to 'exotic atoms' with fractional charges which could be identified by techniques like mass spectroscopy. Many searches for pre-existing quarks in matter have been made, and many strange materials have been investigated (including moon rock,crushed oyster shells, and deep sea sludge) all with null results! Hey ho, hey ho, it's back to the library I go.