By This, this is a stunner of a book. Gorgeous! I chose to listen to it and I felt like I was listening to a book length poem. A verbal painting. An aural landscape. I felt transported.
Orbital describes a 24 hour cycle in the lives of six astronauts in near earth orbit in a space station, but it is less a narrative and more a collage. Across 16 sunrises and sets, we climb into the minds of all six of them, but mostly we are gifted with seeing through their eyes. Orbital is a mesmerizing litany, a list, a catalogue of the earth as seen from space. Its beauty and tenuousness. Its vastness and singularity. Landform and ocean, the visible marks left by humanity’s heedlessness. And the science is there too as we follow the ascending and descending orbits the station follows as it travels at unimaginable speed.
As someone old enough to remember our species’ first forays into space, this book really hummed for me. I always wanted to be an astronaut, to be surrounded by all that space and silence, to have that grand perspective. It is a slim book, just under 150 pages and barely 5 hours on audio, but it is dense with sensory pleasure, dense with big ideas. It is glorious! I may even listen again before I return in to the library.
Seasonal Reading 