Orbital

I picked this up having not seen it before, from the combination of the blurb and the reviews on the cover, promising a beautiful book about astronauts on the International Space Station.

It is precisely that. Delicious, evocative, and poetic prose in a sweeping flow that both captures the disorienting combination of the banal and extraordinary of life in space. Astronauts in (or "on") orbit are inevitably some of the most capable and amazing people alive, but their lives are finely regimented and filled with finicky, highly structured work and lots and lots of housekeeping. The juxtaposition of that caretaking work with the fact they are in space, looking down on the world beneath from a god's-eye view, is central to the narrative here. It is less a story, and more an exploration of the humanity in the extraordinariness of the astronauts, and the extraordinary in the ordinariness of the Earth that they so eagerly and passionately leave behind.

Except they are tethered to it, psychologically, and spend huge amounts of their days ensuring the ISS is kept as close to Earth-like as it can be, because that's what makes space at all liveable.

There was some ebb and flow to the reading of this, for me, times when I lost it a little bit, though that was likely to do with me and the way I was reading it as much as anything to do with the writing.

I found this book beautiful, for its humanity, and its invigoration of our relationship to the Earth. It's short, and well worth your time.