Having learned to survive alone in the first book and forging a friendship in the second, Guy, the hero of Max Brooks' Minecraft trilogy now must learn to find his place in a larger community as he and his companion, Summer, discover two village. The first is abandoned, but the second is full of people who offer a valuable network but are also in need of protection from the traditional mobs of Minecraft and a new evil that Guy has brought upon them.

Not content with making a simple action story, Brooks laces his tale with life lessons and philosophical reflections on environmentalism and citizenship.

I often found it hard to concentrate on the story, though, as reading it brought on a constant stream of flashbacks to my own Minecraft games and the dozens of villages I have discovered, fortified, and exploited. I have revived abandoned villages by curing zombies, but I also remember my wife and daughter being appalled when I told them about the time I pushed living villagers into mining carts and shipped them to a neighboring abandoned village to resettle it after my restoration project.

I quit Minecraft cold turkey a few years back and now devote that time to Goodreads and LibraryThing, but this week I found myself very tempted to just play a little more and maybe apply some of the principles I've picked up from Brooks' books and explore some of the upgrades I've missed. I even loaded up the application once, but I didn't open an actual world. Given my obsessive personality, I fear I'm still not ready to regulate the amount of time I might spend playing, and frankly I'm getting too old for Minecraft all-nighters.

While The Village is marketed as Brooks final book in a trilogy, he leaves a very wide door open for at least one more book, and I do hope he comes back for it one day. ( )