Retired Professor of Political Economy
(Lancaster University, UK - retired 2021)
(also #ProfDJ across the Lune Valley)
Contributor: North West Bylines #NoBridge
I see that Penguin are reissuing Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation as a Penguin Classic.
About time; for many critical political economists Polanyi has been one of the key figures underpinning work on social forces in economics.
The last re-release (the 'third edition') had a high profile forward by Joseph Stiglitz, this edition has a forward by well known Polanyi scholar Gareth Dale.
If you only read on book on economics this year, make it the Great Transformation.
Indeed, that was prompted my post - I didn't link to it as the author seemed to think Poianyi was a lot more obscure & under-published than he actually is....
Seicho Matsumoto's 65yr old crime novel, Point Zero (1959/2024) is presented as the (reported) inner monologue of the wife of a missing man trying to understand his disappearance (just weeks after they have an arranged marriage). Written with a keen sense of post-war Japan, the story swirls around & around leading the reader to draw out the solution to the mystery some time before the protagonist. Lightish, but an enjoyable read.
ha ha, thanks for the typo spot - I quite like it but I think I'll correct anyway - welcome to the Chris May Typo Spotter Club - your work is every much appreciated
If, like me, you think reading is an unalloyed good - you'll be heartened to see Bookbanks, offering books to those who use food banks as a way of removing the cost of books as a barrier to reading....
great idea... as long as the books don't just end up being readers' cast offs!
I sometimes thought my father thought he could't die while he still had books on his pending pile (a stab at immortality I seem to be replicating)... so, it was strangely touching to see Tom Gauld has had similar thoughts.
Ha ha, well access is good, but what we/you really need is infinite time for reading to digest & enjoy them all... or the (large?) portion that you might actually want to read
Holly Pester's short novel The Lodgers (2024), is a timely mediation on the unanchored life of the peripatetic life of the renter/lodger. At times elliptical, with two narratives whose relations remains unsettled, this is a book which offers a real feeling for a key element of modern life; moving from one lodging/rental to another. While at time wry, it remains elegiac in its approach to tenant's despair & longing.
