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4 stars, Bluets, books, first time read, Maggie Nelson, memoir, nonfiction, own book, poetry, read in 2018, reading, review
Title: Bluets
Author: Maggie Nelson
First published: 2009
Dates read: 9.-10.9.2018
Category: first-time read, memoir, non-fiction, poetry
Rating: 4/5
The book in five words or less: meandering and meaningful
My thoughts:
Bluets is a strange book. It’s not quite poetry, but it’s not quite memoir, either. Mostly, what it is, is more. The kind of more that makes you think and that defies neat classification. Bluets reads like a long train of thoughts that meanders from reflections on the colour blue, to grief over the loss of a lover and the near-loss of a friend, to art and literature, pain, pleasure, and everything in between. It’s not quite a stream of consciousness – Bluets is too structured for that – but it jumps around from thought to quote to different thought in a similar way. It is joyful, and sad, and bittersweet, and goes from one to the other in a matter of words.
I know my first rating for this book on goodreads said five stars right after I finished it, but I think I’ll have to knock it down to four. The reason for this being that while I really liked how thought-provoking Bluets is, it didn’t touch and resonate with me quite as much as A Field Guide to Getting Lost and H is for Hawk, the other two non-fiction books I’ve read this year. That said, I do really like Maggie Nelson’s poetic language, the way her thoughts flow from one idea to the next, and the way the book is put together. Who knows, I suspect I might give it the full five (again) at a reread.
And, in a slightly different but related vein, Bluets also made me want to get more serious about my own writing, which is always an added bonus. (The result of that being, of course, the revival of this blog.)
Read if you like: lyrical non-fiction, contemporary poetry, Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and the colour blue
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I read this earlier in the year and had similar thoughts. It reminded me a lot of A Field Guide to Getting Lost, but it didn’t stay with me over time as much. The writing was beautiful, but it didn’t come together as strongly as I’d hoped. Nice review!
Thank you! I think part of why Bluets didn’t stay with me quite as much as Field Guide to Getting Lost is the format – Solnit’s longer chapters lend themselves better to developing longer and deeper thoughts. Bluets had a lot of good ideas, some of them fascinating and thought-provoking, but because of the fragmentary nature of the book I felt many of them just scratched the surface. That said, it’s still a beautiful and thought-provoking book that I liked a lot.