2025 Reading–June

Playground by Richard Powers was my book club’s selection for June. Most people in the group were underwhelmed, but I think that’s because they missed a crucial element of the novel that, in my opinion, elevates it to an extraordinary level. The book is about an unlikely friendship between a privileged suburban White kid and an inner-city Black kid who meet in an elite Chicago high school. They’re both very smart and they first bond over chess, eventually transitioning to the game of Go. They appear to be heading in different directions for college, but circumstances lead them to become roommates at the University of Illinois. The White kid, who has toyed with computer games his whole life, studies coding, and that’s the platform for the book’s trajectory into the world of AI. I highly recommend the book, but it needs to be read carefully.

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson is a historical novel set in 1926 London. I’ll read anything by this author, and this book was a real pleasure. Two (or more) plots intersect here. We begin with a woman being released from prison. Nellie Coker is an owner of a group of nightclubs that frequently run afoul of the law for various reasons, and a new police inspector has been brought from Scotland Yard to shake things up in the city’s underworld. But also, a young girl from York arrives in the city in hopes of breaking into the theater. When her family loses contact with her, they ask a former librarian who is at loose ends to go looking for her. That leads her to the police inspector and, ultimately, the night club scene. It’s all very entertaining and beautifully written.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden was the selection of an International Book Club I participate in. The author is Dutch, although she wrote this novel in English. The story is set in 1961 while The Netherlands is still healing from World War II. It centers on Isabel, who occupies the family home that she and her brothers had moved to with their mother to escape the dangers of Amsterdam during the war. Isabel has been traumatized—by the war and then her mother’s death—and seems to be quite neurotic. Her brothers have their own problems: one is a serial womanizer and the other had been cast out of the family because of his homosexuality. Then a young woman, Eva, comes into their lives. How and why and what then happens provides the book its depth and drama. While I thought the plot and the characters were very well done, the dialogue—characters are constantly interrupting themselves and others—was frustrating. Still, the book has garnered some major prizes and is worth reading.