This Week's Reading

I’m having an existential reading crisis. Two books. Different genres. Both great reading choices. Yet I find myself berating my reading, and my consumption of these books.

Is this a normal reading paradigm?

The first, Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

It looked so innocent.

I picked up a copy at Shakespeare and Company, on the banks of the Seine. A slim volume. Something that won’t weight down the luggage. A Booker Winner - which can mean it’s either wonderful or leaves you scratching your head. (When I say this, I think of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, which I hated.)

This is not to say that I don’t mind a challenge. I love Rushdie and Atwood, and all sorts of authors people can’t get into.

It has taken me a fortnight to read this 138-page novel.

It is utterly brilliant in its simplicity and its views. What there is of a story is that of a number of astronauts orbiting in a space station, providing their viewpoints of life, the planet, love, grief and humanity’s place on the planet.

For a small book, it has incredible clout.

And I don’t feel like I’ve read this properly. I know I’ve carted this across the globe, and it will sit on my little books shelf along with Max Porter, Jean Rhys, they poetry and the plays. All the books I’ve vowed to revisit.

I just feel like I haven’t done this book justice.

Maybe I should read it again in six months. I might. But there is so much else out there to read.

The other book I’ve just started is Elizabeth Gilbert’s All the Way to the River.

I’ll admit to loving Gilbert’s work. I admire both her fiction and non-fiction. The Signature of All Things is one of my favourite novels. Eat, Pray, Love became a how-to manual of the naughties. I’ve followed Gilbert on social media for years. Her writing is seemless, easily consumed, accessible.

This one is different.

Five-years-ago Gilbert’s partner Rayya died. Rayya was a character in herself, larger than life - in many ways the antithesis to Gilbert’s writerly persona. But as a couple, they worked.

All the Way to the River is Gilbert’s memoir of her time with Rayya, through to her passing, and after her death.

I’m only a quarter the way in, and it’s a very raw.

Skimming the reviews, there’s a lot of mixed feelings about this book? Is this a rich, white woman navel gazing? It is facing head on the horrors of addiction, death and dying? Is it a gorgeously written memoir about the darkest period is somebody’s life?

It’s possible it’s all three of these things.

What’s irking me the most is that I’ve delved 100 pages in Gilbert’s memoir overnight, while struggling to read the Harvey in a fortnight.

This feels a bit wrong.

It shouldn’t.

Today's song: 

First published on This week's reading - by Pandora Behr - Pandora’s Substack.