Deb Nance

Jamie Zeppa is at loose ends. Almost impulsively, she decides to move to Bhutan and teach.

She almost as quickly regrets her decision. No convenience foods here. Minimal toilet facilities. Great poverty. Friends are all far, far away.

Zeppa wants to go home to Canada.

But she doesn't. And, as time goes on, she gradually comes to regard Bhutan as her home. Its simplicities delight her. The kindnesses of Bhutan's people overwhelm her. And she loves her new life.

A very satisfying moving-and-starting-over tale.

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.

I like Barbara's books, but she, an extreme liberal, does exactly what the extreme conservatives do: She tells little scary stories out of context to promote her own agenda. Is our land really such a scary and terrible place? I don't think so. What are her suggestions for making things better? She rarely proposes solutions, and, if she does, they are generally a single sentence at the end of her diatribe. Is it useful for people to read books like this? Not if it hardens us to the world and makes dialogue with others more difficult, I think.