The Book Depository blog

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A graduate of Jesus College Cambridge, John Farndon is the author of many books on contemporary issues, including China Rises, India Booms, Bird Flu and Iran.

He also writes widely for children, including the bestselling Do Not Open, and he has been short-listed a unique four times for the Royal Society Junior Science Book. In his spare time, he writes plays, musicals and songs, and songs of his have been selected for the Sondheim singing prize for each of its three years. His play The Naked Guest with translations of Pushkin's poems was listed for the 2009 Academia Rossica Russian translation prize. Do You Think You're Clever? The Oxbridge Questions is his most recent book.

Here is John's Tuesday Top Ten:

The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield

This is one of the great history books, a book that is still brilliantly readable, informative and relevant 80 years after it was written. It tells the gripping story of how the Liberal government of Asquith, elected with a huge popular mandate came to grief in the face of three movements for social change -- the women's movement, the Irish independence movement and trade unionism. What is most enlightening is just how utterly ruthless the Tory establishment and their friends in the army were in defending their interests at the expense of Britain's elected government -- setting in train the tragedy of Northern Ireland.

Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes

Russia still remains an alien, enigmatic place to many of us in the west, yet its cultural impact has been huge, through the works of authors like Tolstoy and Chekhov, composers like Tchaikovksy and Rachmaninov. From the outside, the achievements seem impressive fascinating and profound enough, but Orlando Figes' book shows that from inside Russia, the story is even more remarkable and engrossing.

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton

This to my mind, quite simply, a classic of our times. A seemingly simple tale of an oddball family on the wrong side of the tracks in Perth, Australia, it has all the freewheeling invention and the weight of emotion of a Steinbeck. It's funny, moving and enthralling.

The Lives of the Great Composers by Harold C. Schonberg

Harold C. Schonberg was music critic for the New York Times, and this book brims with his clear, witty and insightful writing. It is a wonderful introduction to classical music told through brief life stories of the great composers.

The Genius of Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate

Jonathan Bate is one of the leading scholars on Shakespeare and a great communicator. This book has none of the startling revelations about the Bard that other books have provided, but it brilliantly explains why Shakespeare is so revered and how attitudes to his work have evolved. It would work well read with Bill Bryson's recent very brief biography. Mind you, even better to read the sonnets or see a great production of 'Macbeth' or 'Twelfth Night'.

Big Bang: The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time and Why You Need to Know About it by Simon Singh

The story of our growing understanding of the Universe and how it came to be is one of the great stories of scientific discovery -- and the Big Bang theory remains at the very frontier of scientific research. Singh unfolds the historical background in a beautifully clear, comprehensive and readable way.

Pushkin by T.J. Binyon

I love Pushkin's poetry. It is so witty, insightful and emotionally rich, and poems like Winter Sun are exhilirating. Pushkin is to Russians what Shakespeare is to the English. In fact, maybe even more so, since many Russian children growing up knowing and even loving his poems. It is hard to appreciate this in English, but Binyon's entertaining and brilliantly-researched biography at least helps you understand just what is that Russians find so fascinating about both the poems and the man, who died aged just 38 in a duel over his young wife, reputedly the most beautiful woman in Russia.

The Major Works by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins poetry is extraordinary. He had his own unique ideas on how the inner essence of nature was formed and upheld by what he called inscape and instress -- and he tried to recreate this in his poetry with its intricate "sprung rhythms" and alliteration, especially in beautiful short poems like The Windhover. Hopkins was a Jesuit priest, but you don't have to be religious to revel in the sheer richness and rhythm of the language -- oddly reminiscent of Shakespeare.

The Essential Tales of Chekhov by A.P. Chekhov

This is, I believe, the greatest collection of short stories every written. Each is a little gem. A simple scenario, briefly told -- yet with the resonance and weight of truth that most great authors fail to achieve in a giant novel. Chekhov is still known mostly for his handful of plays, but the short stories show he was a master of prose, too.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Of course, there are so many great classic novels that I like -- from those of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot to Tolstoy, Lawrence and Joyce -- but to single out one I'd say Bleak House. It's terrific story-telling that's almost impossible to put-down, with wonderful unforgettable characters -- and the description of London at the beginning is simply magnificent.

Each Monday, here on Editor's Corner, I run through the latest issue of the Bookseller magazine and pick out the bits and pieces of book industry news that catch my eye.

This quick round-up of book stuff is mainly culled from the Bookseller magazine (Friday February 5th issue):

• the world's biggest publishers "look set to follow Macmillan US' lead in demanding changes to how Amazon sells and prices e-books, after what was described by one senior UK publishing executive as a 'very significant week and genuinely a very good week for book publishers, authors and readers... Apple's iPad is a big opportunity for the market to sell e-books at sensible prices to a growing market..."
• Apple "will begin shipping the wi-fi models of the iPad from March with the 3G version following in April..."
• independent numbers "dwindled last year with almost two shops closing a week a Booksellers Association figures revealing the biggest net closure since 2004..."
• Book Tokens chairman Willie Anderson "has hit back at criticism by independent booksellers about the new electronic gift card (EGC)"
• travel bookseller Stanfords is "looking to focus on 'customer lifestyle' in a bid to reverse falling profits and sales..."
• BBC presenter "economist and journalist Evan Davies is to chair the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction as the £20,000 award reaches its 12th anniversary..."
• Oxford University Press "has given its dictionaries a digital boost, offering individual customers and institutions an additional online package with any purchase from its 40-strong range..."
• Random House "imprint Yellow Jersey has dominated this year's British Sports Book Awards picking up eight nominations..."
• the government's stance "on the revised Google Settlement has been heavily criticised by authors, with novelist Nick Harkaway calling it 'a statement of crawling weakness'..."
• HarperCollins UK "has increased profit during its second quarter although the recession has continued to hit sales..."

Writing in The Independent the excellent Boyd Tonkin said Jaron Lanier's You are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto contains "the finest diagnosis of the internet's 'culture of sadism' I have ever read". I don't recognise that culture, but I do think this book is an important contribution to a vital debate:

Something went wrong around the start of the 21st century. Individual creativity began to go out of fashion. Music became an endless rehashing of the past. Scientists were in danger of no longer understanding their own research. Indeed, not only was individual creativity old-fashioned but individuals themselves. The crowd was wise. Machines, specifically computers, were no longer tools to be used by human minds - they were better than humans. Welcome to the world of the digital revolution. Yet what if, by devaluing individuals, we are deadening creativity, endlessly rehashing past culture, risking weaker design in engineering and science, losing democracy, and reducing development -- in every sphere?

In You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier, digital guru, and inventor of Virtual Reality, delivers a searing manifesto in support of the human and reflects on the good and bad developments in design and thought twenty years after the invention of the web. Controversial and fascinating, You Are Not a Gadget is a deeply felt defence of the individual from an author uniquely qualified to comment on the way technology interacts with our culture.

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So, Charles Dickens was more radical -- and saucy -- than we've previously imagined, was he!?

This from the Telegraph:

Pip and Herbert from Great Expectations are among those who really have homosexual leanings, the study by Dr Holly Furneaux of Leicester University claimed.

Often Dickens' male characters "conveniently" fall in love with the sister of their best friend, which she read as further evidence that he had woven the suggestion of homosexual relationships into his plots.

She said there were a "raft of prejudices" about supposedly strait-laced Victorians and Dickens in particular that stopped such writing being seen for what she thought it was.

"We have positioned him as this figure of respectability," said Dr Furneaux, a lecturer in Victorian Studies.

But rather than being a writer interested in "hearth and home" and the nuclear family, he was interested in all sorts of sexual relationships, she said (more...)

The Financial Times gets to grips with Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy by Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz declaring it "the best book so far on the financial crisis":

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist, is knowledgeable about the historical background, immersed in the policy debate and a pioneer of the economic theories needed to understand the origins of the problems. Although the material is necessarily difficult at times, the book is also easy to read. It is therefore indispensable not just for those who (like me) are broadly sympathetic to the Stiglitz position but for those who would rebut these charges.

Stiglitz's account begins in the 1980s, the decade of deregulation and privatisation. The symbol of these changes for financial markets was the replacement of Paul Volcker by Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. This set the way for light regulation of the banking system and created a willingness to respond to any market setback with a relaxation of monetary policy -- the "Greenspan put". These developments were not the result of policy oversight but of policy design. Conservatives and Wall Street got the policy framework they had sought (more...)