Orbital by Samantha Harvey

 genre: fiction

For the six astronauts floating above earth in their spacestation, our planet is both monstrously huge and small enough to orbit sixteen times in one Earth day.  This juxtaposition of Earth versus Space, of life on solid ground and life in a gravity-less silver tube is at the heart of this book. I hesitate to call it a "novel" or a "story" because really nothing happens.  Yes, there are six characters.  We learn some about two of them and practically nothing about the others but there is barely any dialogue and really no plot at all.  

The thing is, the language here can be brutally beautiful in its description of this spinning ball we call home, sometimes the ideas almost made me breathless with the enormity of space and my own personal tininess.  But then there would be lists of things and places that went on way too long and the detailing all the countries on this planet got literally boring.  And I am rarely bored.  But I kept thinking surely SOMETHING will happen - maybe with that storm they see on Earth or maybe to one of the astronauts but no.  I can imagine that maybe this is to make us think about the monotony of this life in orbit or that maybe it's to remind us of the never-ending majesty and magic or our lives even existing in the vastness of the universe.  But in the end, it wasn't enough to ever make me want to keep listening.

I chose it because it won the Booker last year, so that's on me.  I didn't really know anything about it and I think three stars is being generous, but I did really like the language sometimes.