2025 Tournament of Books: Orbital vs. The History of Sound

Before it won the Booker, I was largely unaware of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital but I picked it up not too long after it won curious to see what this book was that the Booker judges felt was better than James. I had kind of expected the title to refer to freeways as I’ve generally heard the word “orbital” used in the context of the M25, aka the London Orbital.¹ Instead, the title was a rather literal, speaking of an orbit in space. I read the book and was left thinking, huh? Perhaps (probably?) I was not the right reader for the book when I came to it, but I found it completely unsatisfying.

Ben Shattuck’s collection with its intriguing title had caught my attention before it was on the Tournament of Books short list and this, like Headshot, is one that has gotten a lot of love in my BlueSky feed. Unlike Headshot, I was much more in agreement with the adulation and found myself really wanting to re-read the collection of loosely linked stories a second time to more fully appreciate the connections between the stories.² It shouldn’t surprise anyone that The History of Sound is my pick to advance.

My judgment on the judgment

I got a bit worried when Bobuq Sayed began their judgment by writing:

Novels are the literary infrastructure most coherent to me. Perhaps this is because I am a novelist and consume them more frequently than any other art form. In any case, I find the porousness of poetry to be alienating, and story collections produce a reading experience that is jolted and slow, due in part to the challenge of reorienting myself to new characters and timelines. My implicit preference for the novel form is one shared by editors and the publishing industry at large.

Unlike Sayed, I love short story collections and I’ve generally gravitated to a story collection when investigating a new author.³ This year’s tournament, with three story collections in it is exciting in that respect.

Anyway, despite Sayed’s avowed preference for the novel, I was delighted to reach the end of their judgment to find that they too preferred the dynamism of Shattuck’s History of Sound. This means that I’m slightly over 50% on having the judges agree with my refined and unassailable good taste.

1. How some moron from the US has any awareness at all of a British freeway is a mystery even to that American moron.
2. Alas, time constraints meant that I did not.
3. Interestingly, though I love reading and writing short stories and have published a couple dozen stories totalling 52,000 words, I wouldn’t publish those stories as a collection⁴ unless I was facing death in less time than is currently predicted for me. On the other hand, I’ve written two unpublished novels (one officially trunked and the other on its way there) and am working on a third.
4. Most of these stories do have potential collections attributed to them, but no collection’s set of stories is complete.