Bangkok Book Club meets July 14 to discuss Richard Powers and the fate of the ocean

By Andy — 2026-07-13 — book clubs Bangkok

I watched someone order a book last week that they hadn't actually read yet. They bought it because the cover looked nice.

That's not a complaint, really. But it's the opposite of what's happening at the Bangkok Book Club this coming Monday.

A dozen or so people will show up at Bar Storia del Caffè—the coffee place inside The Salil Hotel on Soi Sukhumvit 57—having read the same book, the whole thing, and they'll spend an evening actually talking about it. Not networking. Not performing. Just working out what they think. It's quieter than it sounds. Harder too.

The book is Richard Powers' Playground. Came out this year. It's about four people whose lives circle a Pacific atoll: a marine biologist watching coral die, a game designer carrying the weight of one childhood friendship, a writer obsessed with Melville who's trying to disappear, and a tech billionaire who wants to build a floating city there—seasteading, they call it, the idea that you can escape government entirely if you just float far enough out.

Powers won the Pulitzer in 2019 for a novel about forests. This one's about the ocean instead.

He spent years researching actual reefs. The bleaching. What happens when the temperature shifts just enough to kill everything that was keeping a system alive. Actually, that's not quite right—not kill. More like expel. The corals turn white and lose the organisms that feed them, and they're still technically there but they're gone. He saw the Great Barrier Reef in its collapse. He looked at French Polynesia.

The novel doesn't lecture you. It shows you a reef dying and a reef alive and makes you feel the difference between those two things.

Why this, here

Bangkok Book Club has been meeting monthly for years. Expats, mostly, and whoever else reads in English and wants to spend an evening with books instead of screens. We pick recent literary fiction, as far as I can tell, and something like Playground fits that—but there's more to it.

The Coral Triangle is out there. Philippines, Indonesia, Solomon Islands, that part of the world. It holds about 76 percent of the planet's coral species. One hundred and twenty million people or more eat because of those reefs. Bangkok itself is built on a delta that climate people keep flagging as one of the most at-risk cities by the end of this century, sea-level rise and all.

So when you read about a fictional atoll being eyed for corporate development.

And actual reefs are bleaching a few hours' flight from here.

The book's central question stops feeling abstract. You can't make it abstract anymore.

Powers is genuinely unsure about his billionaire character—genuinely unsure whether human ingenuity is the problem or the only solution, whether we're too clever for our own good or not clever enough. Readers disagree about this. That disagreement is useful. That's where the conversation gets sharp.

The format is just discussion. No one's presenting. No prepared remarks. People who've read the book talking to people who've read the book. And if you haven't finished—go anyway. Powers writes fiction where even a partial read leaves you with something to say, some genuine confusion or pushback.

The Salil is at the Thong Lo end of Sukhumvit. Manageable from most of the city. Monday, July 14. Bar Storia del Caffè.

Bring the book or don't.

Tags: Richard Powers, Bangkok Book Club, Playground novel, Bangkok literary events 2026, Richard Powers Playground ocean themes, expat book clubs Bangkok Sukhumvit