The 2026 One Read runner-up “Playground” by Richard Powers, will be the subject of October’s First Thursday Book Discussion on October 1, at noon in the Children’s Programming Room at the Columbia Public Library.
Both “Playground” and the One Read title “Remarkably Bright Creatures” explore interactions between humans and marine environments, but they diverge from there. “Playground” falls solidly into the ecological literature genre alongside Powers’ previous Pulitzer Prize winning novel “Overstory.” In a style to similar “Overstory,” Powers weaves a complex web of history, characters and ecology orbiting mostly around a remote Pacific island in French Polynesia and three primary characters Evelyne, Todd and Rafi.
As a child growing up in an wealthy but dysfunctional home, Todd found Evelyne’s pioneering marine biology text comforting. Rafi’s abusive father relentlessly drilled him in reading and literature. When Todd and Rafi meet at an elite school they seem like opposites but bond over the intellectual challenges of the ancient board game Go.
Decades later, Evelyne is in her 90s, Todd has made billions in artificial intelligence and Rafi is living a quiet life as a father and teacher — his friendship with Todd a distant memory. The lives and interests of these three converge on a remote Pacific island, where a tiny population will decide its fate.
Dr. Cindy Dudenhoffer will lead this month’s discussion. Dudenhoffer is a teaching professor at the University of Missouri in the College of Education and Human Development, the associate director of the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies and an AI Faculty Fellow and director of the WeMake — Learn and Design Lab.
