Living in Helsinki means I get unlimited access to the library and that has turned me into a very picky book buyer. In this economy, a book has to earn its spot on my personal shelf. I only want to own the ones I potentially truly love. So when I took a gamble and bought Playground by Richard Powers, I was crossing my fingers a little. It turned out to be one of the best book purchases I’ve made in a while.

This book blew me away.

Playground follows four people whose lives eventually intertwine on Makatea, a historic island whose phosphate deposits once helped feed the world. Each character carries their own struggles, and Powers writes them with so much care and depth that you feel every bit of it. The story shifts between different points of view, and the transitions are seamless. I always knew exactly whose head I was in, right from the first line of each section.

And then there are the descriptions. The way this book captures the magic and grandeur of nature, the messiness of human relationships, and life’s big questions genuinely left me speechless. It’s easy to see why this one counts as a great read.

If I had to pick a favorite part, it would be the first half of the book. The prose there is charming and poetic, and reading it felt like floating. Powers is a genius at blending deep emotional moments with sharp commentary on current events, all wrapped in a fascinating look at how humans and nature connect.

I got so lost in this story that I didn’t even realize how many lines I had highlighted along the way. Scroll down to check them out, you might just find your next favorite quote there.

My Favorite Bits

• The world with all its bright and surprising contents was created out of boredom and emptiness. Everything started by holding still and waiting.

• How could I pick the right one when it might be any book in the entire store? Thousands of them. Tens of thousands.

• The world was bigger, stranger, richer, and wilder than I had a right to ask for.

• I vowed to spend the rest of my life the way my love did. I would give myself to the ocean, that wilderness that made the land seem an afterthought. I would dive in all latitudes and descend to all depths, and in each place I would find whole, new, impossible kinds of life.

• The course of civilization is carved in ocean currents. Where sea layers mix, where rains travel or wastelands spread, where great upwellings bring deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters to the energy-bathed surface and fish go mad with fecundity, where soils turn fertile or anemic, where temperatures turn habitable or harsh, where trade routes flourish or fail: all this the global ocean engine determines. The fate of continents is written in water. And sometimes great cities owe their existence to tiny ocean islands.

• Everyone needs to eat, but few people are aware of who sets the table.

• People and their emotions puzzled me. They were stupidly complex, and there was no way to break them apart and see what was inside.

• I was done with Denial and was working my way through Resentment. I’d rolled enough dice in my life to know how chance works. My life’s luck had defied the odds. It was time to regress to the mean.

• Play was evolution’s way of building brains, and any creature with a brain as developed as a giant oceanic manta sure used it.
  If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play.

• Reading left him untouchable on a raft in the middle of an ocean of bright words.

• She grew adept at not hearing—a protective adaptation all its own.

• She didn’t live by words. She lived by life.

• Life was beyond belief, beyond the capacity for belief that life itself had tinkered into being.

• I … can get free. Sometimes. But only when reading. When I read… the other place is more real than this one.

• “It’s the first mystery of my existence: That to get their revenge on a culture that’s killing them, my parents pushed their child into a place that they themselves can never understand. (..) They got what they wanted, but now they want the old me back.”

• We humans are built to compete, built to spout opinions, built to seek prestige and shiny, built to watch our accounts and ratings grow, built to impress our friends and vanquish our enemies. Or maybe we’re just built to play.

• “As Arthur C. Clarke has observed: ‘How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean?”

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Author: Richard Powers
Publication date: 24 September 2024
Number of pages: 381 pages

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