A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky ChambersMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
4.5 stars! Admittedly, this started slowly for me, but I think it is largely due to the fact that the only time I really give myself to read is right before bed. It was perhaps the perfect follow-up to my reading of _Siddhartha_ and strangely similar. Sibling Dex, a non-binary tea monk who may be having a bit of a crisis, is very much a seeker like Hesse's Siddhartha in that they feel a gap in the life they have chosen. Unlike Siddhartha, however, Dex has a companion--the robot Mosscap. I'm not giving anything away given the name of the series.
Once Mosscap entered the narrative I became much more invested. There's a tremendous beauty to this book. The theology and history that Chambers builds is very intriguing. We learn of the "Factory Age" that we might assume has some parallels to our current Anthropocene. Robot consciousness develops (as "an accident") and there is a climactic event/transition wherein robots decide to leave and humans revert to a more agricultural lifestyle, informed by a pantheistic (?) religion, that seems more akin to some indigenous understandings/approaches of/to religion. The world is not devoid of mechanics, but what exists is there in the service of recycling and renewing, such as Dex's greywater filter that they use in their mobile shower as they pedal across the land with their wares.
Oh could we ever use tea monks now. "Everybody needed a cup of tea sometimes. Just an hour or two to sit and do something nice, and then they could get back to whatever it was." (88%).
The book, largely through Mosscap, asks us to consider the purpose-driven life and how much of that defines our humanity. How much do we miss of the exhilaration of consciousness?
This is a book to read with intention, not as you drift off to sleep.
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2026 Reading Goals: 38/60
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