The year is nearly gone, and I’m yet to make my first Cannonball17 post. Scrolling through my list of 2025 reads, when I saw this I knew it was the one.
This is a slim novel, nothing much happens. It took me longer than expected to read, because my mind kept spinning away, following one of its spidersilk threads off into the universe.
Six people orbit the earth sixteen times over the course of a day, their thoughts spiralling from the mundane to the astounding as they go about their work, tend to the animal needs of their bodies, reminisce, dream, hope and watch the planet dancing between darkness and light beneath them.
There are no aliens. No disasters requiring heroics. No personal dramas, or betrayals. Nothing more than six ordinary extraordinary people experiencing little moments against the landscape of their lives, feeling the thrum of their connections to the people and planet spinning below them as the “earth dips through space like a creature diving and finds another day”.
When I read this book it triggered so many thoughts that carried me off the page into my own memories and longings. And then I’d come back again, the beauty of the language pulling me back in.
And now, another year is done. An arbitrary point on our planet’s lap around its sun is about to be crossed. And we all go around again, tending to our work and our bodies, our thoughts spiralling between the tiny and the immense. Being human.