Will I love Bluets?

I heard about this delightful book from a friend and knew I had to read it. It is a meditation on the color blue. Each of Nelson’s “propositions” explores blue metaphorically, literally, historically, emotionally.

Reading this book I immersed myself in blue and all its facets, and through doing so I discovered the worlds of other colors, so that when I step outside, I see not only green but all greens, not only brown but all browns, and blue, of course, everywhere.

A deceptively simple idea: tell the story of falling in love. But for this book what the author falls in love with is the color blue. How can you fall in love with a color? It’s not as simple as it first appears.

The various aspects of love become, if anything, more real when talking about the various aspects of this color, looked at from various angles, digested, and felt. Lust and fucking and sadness and longing all come into play. And, of course, the object of affection rarely acts the way you want it to.

But by allowing her… show more.

Bluets is a work of fragmentary nonfiction so overwrought, and so filled with tears and heartbreak, that I return to it for solace whenever I’m wrought with such feelings.

It begins with the claim that the narrator has fallen in love with the color blue.

She writes of different encounters with the color’s pigments and presentations, as well as Joni Mitchell’s Blue, the biology of color, philosophy of perception, and more like this, all while she is blue: lonely, heartbroken, sad.

Bluets is beautiful, intelligent, heartbreaking, consoling; it is not afraid of to weep.

Just like Nelson describes wishing to… show more.

This slim book is a series of numbered sections, all contemplating the color blue. It’s full of interesting facts, some of them quite funny or surprising, as it looks into blue stones, blue movies, blue feelings (sadness), the blues (music), and much more, from self-help books to artists and philosophers. But part of what makes it moving is that it is also a love story of sorts as the speaker charts her struggle to come to terms with being left by her lover. There is another story embedded in the book as well—the story of her close friend who becomes… show more.