Deb Nance

The old world is gone, and the new world is here. Dex, stirred by the desire to hear crickets, leaves his job and becomes a tea monk, and he is good at his job. Still, though, he is not satisfied, wandering place to place, serving tea to comfort others, and one day he leaves that job, too, and heads into the wilderness. And there he meets what he'd never thought to ever see—a robot. Robots were first built to work for humans, but somewhere along the way robots sought liberation from that work and humans set them free. This robot, Mosscap, has sought out a human to make first contact, and it is to Dex that he directs his questions. Dex, too, wants something from Mosscap, guidance into finding an old hermitage in the wilderness.

And so Dex and Mosscap set out for the hermitage together, talking, reflecting, questioning.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a soothing little story, hopeful, and optimistic, offering a picture of a future for those of us who feel stuck in our desperately-imperfect, intractable world.

Can a reader say I liked The Castle? Loved it? If one does, what does that say about the reader?

I think all would agree that The Castle has one of the oddest plots ever written. A man comes to a castle, wants to work there, and has to find ways to get the attention of the people in the castle. He never does much of anything in the story except try to gain entry to the castle and he never successfully does that.

It's the feeling of the book that is so close to the bone; it's a story of the feelings of modern life. Kafka captures the anxiety and the dread and the confusion and the anomie of day-to-day life in the world, and he does it in a way that makes the reader feel all the anxiety and the dread and the confusion and the anomie.

It's brilliant and terrifying. I'm glad I read it. I'm glad I'm done with it.

Debra Dean had a wonderful idea for a novel, but the novel itself never lived up to my expectations for it. The setting, a museum in Leningrad during wartime, was new to me, and all the details - the food rationing, the artwork, the human misery during that time - were fascinating. Sadly though, the characters never felt as three-dimensional as the setting; the paintings felt more well rounded than the people walking among them. A beautiful title, a beautiful cover, and a beautiful idea for a novel—surely with just a little more editing, a little more work on the part of the author, an exceptional novel would have been published, rather than just this rather run-of-the-mill book.

No, with killing and bombings
and trash dumped in the street
and racial hatred, Kosovo doesn't
sound like a great place to visit.
But when Paula Huntley's husband
was sent to Kosovo to help
establish a legal system, Huntley
impulsively decides to accompany
him and later jumps into teaching
a group of Kosovo Albanians
English. Unexpectedly, Huntley
falls in love—with the country,
with its people.

Yes, I'd heard of Kosovo, but
I doubt I'd have been able to
write a coherent essay explaining
much about the conflict there
prior to reading this book.
I recommend this book. In some
ways, it reminded me of Reading
Lolita in Tehran. But can we
self-centered Americans ever
read too much about areas of
the world where people don't
spend most of their day at
the mall or playing Nintendo?