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A review by indiekay
A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
5.0
Second review from July 2022
So I got the physical copy of this book for my birthday and was very excited to reread it again, even though it's been about 6 months since the first time I read it. This time I read the book and added annotations along the way. I was having a really anxious "my life is in shambles and I need to make changes to it so I can figure out how to be happy" mind space at the time, and reading this book was like a soothing balm over that anxiety.
The first time I read this book I fixated on the cricket thing - which definitely wasn't the thing I was meant to fixate on, but I was in a certain mindset back then too, and it was the thing I related to most then.
I can see myself rereading this again in another 6 months. It truly is such a magical little book.
First review from January 2022 (audiobook)
A new favourite book!
I started falling in love with this book from the first chapter and continued to love it from then on. This is a gentle sci-fi about a world in which the planet has been given back to nature, and I just felt like I was wrapped up in a warm blanket reading this.
The biggest thing I took away from this book, which maybe wasn't the point but which I grabbed onto nonetheless, was that the main character, Sibling Dex, is a garden monk who one day realises they want to hear crickets singing, and they can't remember the last time they heard them, but they know there are no crickets in the city. So they decide to change up their whole life, and become a tea monk, traveling the country side and asking each person they meet if the area has crickets. And then they finally cave and search the internet to see where they can find crickets, and find that they're basically extinct. The last place they were heard was an abandoned hermitage in the middle of the Wilds.
Every time I think about this idea of wanting to hear crickets sing only to find that they're basically extinct, I want to cry. Not only for the environment aspects of that thought, that we might get to that's stage too one day, but in the search for nostalgia kind of way. Like remembering the exact shade of lipstick your grandmother wore every single day of her life, but when you try and buy that lipstick you realize the company that made them went out of business 10 years prior.
I don't think I'll ever be able to hear a cricket singing again without thinking about this book.
So I got the physical copy of this book for my birthday and was very excited to reread it again, even though it's been about 6 months since the first time I read it. This time I read the book and added annotations along the way. I was having a really anxious "my life is in shambles and I need to make changes to it so I can figure out how to be happy" mind space at the time, and reading this book was like a soothing balm over that anxiety.
The first time I read this book I fixated on the cricket thing - which definitely wasn't the thing I was meant to fixate on, but I was in a certain mindset back then too, and it was the thing I related to most then.
I can see myself rereading this again in another 6 months. It truly is such a magical little book.
First review from January 2022 (audiobook)
A new favourite book!
I started falling in love with this book from the first chapter and continued to love it from then on. This is a gentle sci-fi about a world in which the planet has been given back to nature, and I just felt like I was wrapped up in a warm blanket reading this.
The biggest thing I took away from this book, which maybe wasn't the point but which I grabbed onto nonetheless, was that the main character, Sibling Dex, is a garden monk who one day realises they want to hear crickets singing, and they can't remember the last time they heard them, but they know there are no crickets in the city. So they decide to change up their whole life, and become a tea monk, traveling the country side and asking each person they meet if the area has crickets. And then they finally cave and search the internet to see where they can find crickets, and find that they're basically extinct. The last place they were heard was an abandoned hermitage in the middle of the Wilds.
Every time I think about this idea of wanting to hear crickets sing only to find that they're basically extinct, I want to cry. Not only for the environment aspects of that thought, that we might get to that's stage too one day, but in the search for nostalgia kind of way. Like remembering the exact shade of lipstick your grandmother wore every single day of her life, but when you try and buy that lipstick you realize the company that made them went out of business 10 years prior.
I don't think I'll ever be able to hear a cricket singing again without thinking about this book.