Summer Dispatch #7: Summer Reading

I read A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers today. It's a novella, so it's easy to get through, but I went out and bought the sequel after I'd read about 20 pages. It's about a tea monk called Dex who leaves their city to try and find something that has been missing. While on the road, they meet Mosscap, a robot, which is a bit of a shock because the robots on this world gained sentience about 200 years before the events of this story and went out into the wild.

That is the basic plot, but really, the book is a gentle meditation on purpose. It is exactly what I needed right now. The dedication of the book, which says "For anybody who could use a break," states the purpose of the book, and for me, it provided a break. It doesn't really provide answers, for Dex or for the reader, but it does give us a break on the road of our lives.

I very much enjoyed this book. I keep coming back to the word gentle. It is a gentle story, and I believe we need more gentleness these days, but it isn't without weight. It's just a nice story, and I recommend it.