January 6, 2025

SPACE

Our Christmas tree was wonderful, lush and redolent until (almost) the very end, and once it was gone, we had so much space it was almost like getting a new room, and so we tidied it. Too many books, as always, so I got rid of a lot of them, and then freed up an entire shelf by relocating my encyclopedia set (circa 1987, Berlin Wall forever) to a space on top of another bookcase that had previously been occupied by crap and clutter. Which means SPACE, my books with room to breathe, my personal library with room to grow. And speaking of SPACE, here is ORBITAL, by Samantha Harvey, which (I will confess!) I was not much looking forward to reading because I’d read her previous novel DEAR THIEF—pitched as a fabulous novel that not enough people were reading, a mark of the state of publishing together—and I didn’t like it at all, perhaps because I don’t actually know the song “Famous Blue Raincoat” on which the novel is cleverly based. So when ORBITAL won the Booker Prize, I didn’t rush out and buy it, but requested it from the library instead, finally sitting down to read it over the holidays, and IT WAS SO GOOD. Yes, it’s me, as ever, with the least hot takes, but I adored this book, which is set on the international space station over the course of a single earth-day, and it really was a love song to our planet and to people and the possibilities when we choose to be our better selves. The image that has stuck on my mind is the floating astronauts at the window watching the earth down below, Harvey giving us the whiteness on the bottom of their very clean socks, which is a perspective I’d never even started to imagine. When I was finished reading, I pushed it onto my teen, who read it in an evening, and then her dad read it too, and we had to buy our own copy because we all loved it so much—and with the relocated encyclopedia there is even room to shelf it now. And I barely know about controversy the book was embroiled in either (it was targeted with bad reviews on Goodreads for supposedly glorifying Russia [um, it definitely does not]) because I’ve spent very little time on social media in the past month, which I’m not sorry about at all, a choice that has freed up mental SPACE for me to read and think and be, and I’m going to carry all that with me into a hopefully spacious new year.