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Oh goodness, what do you say about the Booker Prize winner? This is beautiful writing and an interesting premise, I get it. However, purely based on what I want from a book, it was a skim read for the main part with my focus being on the rare moments of character and their narratives. I‘d have read a longer book about the astronauts and their back stories but 135 pages about what they can see of Earth from their spaceship was enough for me.

I would have bailed on this if it were not so short and a book club pick. The writing style is the type that gives me a headache. At times it was like reading a list.

#25Alive! Day 21: My #FaveWinterFood is seafood ramen - or any kind of soup, really. 💕

With this, I decided to bail. It‘s too painful for me I wanted to cry. My issue with this novel is the delivery. “Its beauty echoes - its beauty is its echoing, its ringing singing lightness.” 🤨 What?! Is she a disciple of Lawrence Durrell?

Buddy-reading this with my colleague. I‘m about 20% in and I feel that the author is trying hard to impress the readers with her sentence structure. I‘m not impressed at all 😭

#25Alive! Day 13: #Memory of her mother is what Japanese astronaut, Chie, had to remember as her mother died while she was on orbit. Finished reading this novel over the weekend for #ToB25 and will hopefully share my thoughts soon over at GatheringBooks.

Rotating above the Earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, but even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene.

#firstlinefriday
#currentlyreading

A short book that felt really long.

Orbital has poignant moments, but, unfortunately, I've already forgotten them.

My final read of 2024. It didn‘t grab me. I can do no plot if the character development is excellent or the subject of interest. It was beautifully written and there were moments, just not quite enough of them for me.

#25Alive! Day 9: This is a #FreshStart for me for the #ToB25 - it is the first time I am joining and I feel like I am crazy for even attempting. The books I ordered are arriving shortly, four have already arrived. This is really turning out more to be a reading tournament, lols. Let‘s see how much I ultimately end up reading. 🤣😂🤩

Can a bad story be beautifully written? This book unambiguously proves the answer is yes. There‘s no story here—which was undoubtedly the author‘s intent—it is simply 200+ pages of people marveling at the vastness of the universe, the wonder & fragility of human existence, seeing Earth from space, & the simultaneous mundanity/extreme risk of living on the space station. Gorgeous, contemplative writing but it‘s oddly lacking in emotional impact.

Read this one to close out 2024 and oof. This just really didn‘t work for me.

Today‘s reading when not working…

Brief yet astonishingly beautiful, this Booker Prize winner follows 6 astronauts from around the world, as they travel not to the moon or Mars or galaxies unknown, but around our own planet. Aboard the International Space Station, they witness 16 sunrises and sunsets over just 24 hours, reflecting on their lives, loved ones, borders, time, and space. Slightly less substantial or radical than I‘d like, but a worthwhile trip all the same!

Set this aside to read to year‘s end/the new year, it should have been the perfect, contemplative book full of descriptions. As mentioned often in the text, the experience of space is both mundane and magnificent and this slim book attempts to convey both. Vignette-style there are glimpses of the six space station astronauts, their thoughts, and even flashes of earth-bound incidents. Best read with a meditative mindset, which I could not obtain.

This is a beautifully written book, and I do understand why it won the Booker, but if you want a plot, don‘t look here. This is simply various descriptions of the Earth as seen through the eyes of 6 astronauts as they complete 16 orbits of Earth. Harvey also provides glimpses into their minds and lives, but nothing really happens in the book.

This book is beautifully written. Reading this you do feel like you are weightless as you float around the spacecraft observing earth.
And the descriptions of the earth are mind blowing. As we travelled over each country and each sunrise and sunset, I could picture them all vividly.
In a time when leaders are calling war on the defenceless over man made boarders, the dialogue around those lack of lines on the earth from outer space is poignant.

Lovely, just lovely. Don‘t expect high drama and fast plot; the writing is quietly powerful. It‘s a good idea to know what this book *is* before reading. #ToBShortList #Dec2024 Book115

Roadtrip to KCMO to catch a flight to New England. I woke up with the bother of a cold; going anyway. I‘ll keep my distance from people, I promise.

🎄#5JoysFriday @DebinHawaii 🎄

Just a few joys that topped my mind these few minutes as I get pretty toes and before I resume reading the tagged book.

I liked the message of this book but found the reading part so boring 😴😴

Just not for me I guess.
#ToB

Winner of the Booker Prize and a love letter to Earth. I enjoyed this quick read that somehow felt slow-paced.

I was looking forward to this one, and it might have been something I would've loved. If I had more time to read it. It's a slow and quiet book, and I should've given it that.

Sometimes we need to take a step back to see the whole picture. Just like we do here. Seeing the world from above, from far away. But we also have this distance when it comes to the characters, which was a miss, at least for me.

Thoughtful and poetic, a love letter to earth while questioning humankind‘s ability to take care of her. Seeing the world through the eyes of various astronauts and a cosmonaut from varying backgrounds was really illuminating and quite different from anything I‘ve ever read. Great on #audio! I will be thinking about this one for a while! #BookspinBingo @TheAromaofBooks

The Booker Prize winner for 2024, Orbital is a work of fiction that is a reflection on the world and how we need to treasure it. This novella follows six astronauts as they live in a space station orbiting around the Earth. Through 16 rotations, they conduct experiments, live together and find themselves drawn to thoughts about home. As they pass over Earth, they bear witness to the beauty, frailty and destructive forces that occur every day.

Sigh. It‘s not you, Orbital, it‘s me. But maybe it‘s you, just a little. (Also maybe audio was a poor choice for me with this one.)

I was enticed by the Booker win and an immediately available audio copy on Libby. This sounded like something I‘d enjoy: meditative and thoughtful. I like meditative and thoughtful. I don‘t need a page-turning plot, but I did want some semblance of a story. Halfway through I‘m still struggling to remember ⤵️

💤

https://youtu.be/FiLkv_JjbBg?si=3xVZFff79eQXeZKE

Introduction

Mystery guest

Weekly highlights

Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

I know I wrote that if you won the Booker, I would give you another chance. So of course you won, but I‘m just not in the mood to do it right now. So maybe we‘ll meet again sometime in the future?

Little bit of a background change for me. I'm at a conference through Saturday. Today's pre-conference program focused on strategic planning. It was actually quite a great program. And the book I brought to read is this year's Booker Prize winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

#bookerprize2024
I mean, I'm not *unhappy* but of the eight longlisted books I've read so far this one came in at 4th place. 🤷
Would love to know if it was anyone here's top pick.

I listened to the audio version of Orbital (what now seems like ages ago) and really enjoyed it. I recall it being meditative, something I am typically drawn to because life is so noisy.

Another perfect read following the results of the election. I was transported out of this world, immersed in the lives of astronauts orbiting Earth. It puts into perspective how small each of our lives is and how little we, as individuals, matter in the grand scheme of things. While this can seem upsetting at first, it‘s actually rather freeing for me personally. The book zooms in on characters‘ experiences but then way out to the universal.

6 astronauts orbit the Earth & reflect on what brought them to that point. A beautiful & poetic book. Who knew I‘d need a book set in space to gain a little perspective this week.

“We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything.”

This is interesting but I have no idea how it made the Booker shortlist. It all happens in a day on the ISS as they circle the Earth. It's about the environment and the absurdity of politics and maybe a bit about humanity in general.

#BookSpinBingo @TheAromaofBooks

I am not sure that I really liked the elegiac structure of this book. Didn‘t really work for me.

This is a book for language lovers. Yes there are characters, there is a semblance of a plot, Harvey talks about space, and earth and not so subtly about climate change, but it is all background to her gorgeous prose.
This is definitely a pick, and a great book for the Booker short list. I am in a bit of a slump so this book that would normally take me a day to read room me 2 weeks, not a reflection of the book but of my current struggles.

A book that made me feel dizzy with the description of a space station orbiting the earth as the astronauts contemplate their lives and families on earth who pass repeatedly in the blink of an eye. But also dizzy with prose describing the beauty of a unique planet seen from blinking lights of cities tounending oceans of blue. It was a short read, but it took me some time to absorb it all. I enjoyed it + feel it needs a reread.

Tha shortlist
Booker

The One - Nov 12

Next up on #kindle

Sustained wandering reflection. An imagined day on the ISS… reflecting - on life, pasts & futures, practical realities in this tiny station, on the earth out the window, on existence. One astronaut is determined to reach the moon, another works a radio connecting to amateur radio operators on the ground within range. One has just lost her mother, yesterday. This book is one day, 16 rotations around the earth. I floated off with their thoughts.

There were parts of this book that I liked, but mostly it just felt to me like rambling. I can understand why some people like it, and why it‘s been Booker shortlisted, but it‘s not my cup of tea. I feel it can be summed up by a quote from the book itself: “It‘s just imaginings and projections, and they could all be wrong.”

"Maybe it's hard to shift from thinking your planet is safe at the centre of it all to knowing in fact it's a planet of normalish size and normalish mass rotating about an average star in a solar system of average everything in a galaxy of innumerable many, and that the whole thing is going to explode or collapse."

This book is a meditation on existence, perspective, and what it means to be human. There's not really any plot, and listening to the audiobook was kind of like listening to a creek flowing by or to yoga studio music. It prompts big thoughts, but there's not much to it.

Photo: Contrail from a Starlink satellite launch a few months ago.

Starting my next book

#booker #booker2024 #longlist #shortlist

I liked it. It's not as profound as the blurbs would have us believe and, little glimpses of their Earth-lives notwithstanding, the astronauts are largely interchangeable (though I suppose it's a vocation selecting from a narrow bandwidth, character-wise.) While there's no plot to speak of (I'm not doing a very good job of selling this, am I?😆), I found the repetition soothing and, though it's a short book, I wanted to take my time over it.

This poetic, rhythmic, meditative novel was not for me. There is no plot, and although I can appreciate what this work is doing, it did not captivate me. I switched to the audio version at about the 50% mark since I was having trouble making myself pick it up. 3 🌟 #bookerlonglist
@squirrelbrain @JenP @AnneCecilie @charl08 @JamieArc @BarbaraBB @Graywacke @jlhammar @Deblovestoread

This was just okay for me. It is beautifully written but very loose/lacking in plot and character development. This is a book about reflections and big ideas. Repetitive and ultimately boring for me.

Our panel reviewed it on the blog here:

https://thereadersroom.org/2024/08/23/20024-booker-longlist-orbital-by-samantha-...

The premise is simple: a day in the life of 6 astronauts on the ISS as they orbit the earth 16 times. But this slim book contains some profound musings about humans, our place in the universe, and the stupidity of our petty grievances with one another. I thought it was really good and expect aspects of it to really stick with me.