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A review by victoriaknow
Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie
5.0
This was gorgeous. I normally don't read essays. I don't read travel writing and I don't read books about nature. I ended up reading this because of the recommendation from a fellow book-lover (whose opinion I trust), and i'm so glad I did. Aside from discovering that these highly neglected genres may have something to offer me after all, I also experienced things that i might never have even thought were possible to experience.
Through this book I sailed up a fjord in Greenland and smelled the floating stillness of icebergs, I peered through a microscope at a human intestine and I stood inside a whale's skeleton and imagined how huge the animal might once have been. I don't normally enjoy a lot of description but her writing is honestly so wonderfully evocative and simultaneously relatable that it's more like listening to a close friend tell you a long story about an experience they once had. There are all sorts of personal details that Ms Jamie shares that immediately spark sympathy in us as readers, keeping us hanging on, travelling her journeys right along with her.
It helps that she's done amazingly interesting things and experienced some bits of the world that very few people have, but I think that even had she simply gone on a boring tour of your own home town, she'd have been able to describe it in a way that caught your interest. She's a poet, but the sorcery in her use of language makes her work more accessible, not less. Now I want to read her other books. This book was obviously the cure for my "travel writing isn't my genre" misconception.
Through this book I sailed up a fjord in Greenland and smelled the floating stillness of icebergs, I peered through a microscope at a human intestine and I stood inside a whale's skeleton and imagined how huge the animal might once have been. I don't normally enjoy a lot of description but her writing is honestly so wonderfully evocative and simultaneously relatable that it's more like listening to a close friend tell you a long story about an experience they once had. There are all sorts of personal details that Ms Jamie shares that immediately spark sympathy in us as readers, keeping us hanging on, travelling her journeys right along with her.
It helps that she's done amazingly interesting things and experienced some bits of the world that very few people have, but I think that even had she simply gone on a boring tour of your own home town, she'd have been able to describe it in a way that caught your interest. She's a poet, but the sorcery in her use of language makes her work more accessible, not less. Now I want to read her other books. This book was obviously the cure for my "travel writing isn't my genre" misconception.