They never truly felt like they got a handle on that. In those hours, they frequently asked themself what it was they were doing. It was the ideal mix of getting away yet not standing out.ĭespite these blessings, sometimes Dex could not sleep. There was a strange comfort about being in an unfamiliar town not too far from home, where the familiarity was limited to building materials and social customer. “My cat died last night,” she said, right before bursting into tearsĭex realized with a stomach-souring thud that they were standing on the wrong side of the vast gulf between having read about doing a thing and doing the thing. Handling their first therapy client as a tea monk

A never-ending harmony of making, doing, growing, trying, laughing, running, living. The City was a healthy place, a thriving place. A towering architectural celbration of curves and polish and colored lights, laced with the connective thread of elevated rail lines and smooth footpaths, flocked with leaves that spilled lushly from every balcony and center divider, each inhaled breath perfumed with cooking spice, fresh nectar, laundry drying in the pristine air. It doesn’t matter that your friends are there, as well as every building you love, every park whose best hidden corners you know, every street your feet instinctively follow without needing to check for directions. It doesn’t matter if the city is a good city, as Panga’s only City was. Sometimes, a person reaches a point in their life when it becomes absolutely essential to get the fuck out of the city It doesn’t matter if you’ve spent your entire adult life in a city, as was the case for Sibling Dex. It could easily stand alone as a short story or a one act play but is hard to summarize and still convey the essence of it.īelow are the quotes that conveyed the tone and energy of the book best.

Focusing on the plot of a tea monk having an existential crisis then meeting a robot a few hundred years after robots gained sentience and exiled the world misses that.Ĭhapter 6 especially where Dex prepares dinner while Mosscap (the robot) helps and asks questions about why humans prepare food and eat meals was the best example of the pleasantness. It’s more of a slice of life vignette than a plot dependent book. Reviews of it focus on the plot, but that misses the word building and spectacular writing. And it is a pleasant to read in that the feeling evoked while learning about the world are goodwill and joy rather than depression or apathy. It was pleasant to read in that every word and every sentence was clearly, deliberately and precisely chosen. A Psalm for the Wild-Built is the most pleasant book I read in the last year.

A psalm for the wild build