Hello my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. Today it's the Talking

Politics Guide to Summer Reading. We asked our regular contributors to tell us the book

that they've most enjoyed reading recently and the one that they're really looking

forward to reading this summer. These Talking Politics guides are brought to you as

ever in partnership with the London Review of Books, who's summer sale with the

Paris Review, two subscriptions for one low price, is open to Talking Politics

listeners. Head to lrb.co.uk forward slash guides for more information along

with the usual lists of further readings from the lrb archive.

So a book that I'm reading currently because I never seem to finish books for pleasure

anymore, but is Naomi Aldermann's The Power, which I started back in the winter and then

I put down, but now I've picked up again. And it's a piece of science fiction that I consider

actually dystopian, which is my favorite kind. It's a fairly pessimistic view of human

nature actually. So the premises that women discover the power to shoot electro shocks

out of their fingertips. And this totally upends and reverses the gender balance, the power

balance in the political world. This book is being written from 5,000 years in the future

where a man is starting to wonder, you know, how did gender imbalances come to be the way

they be? And the reason that it's a pessimistic book is essentially right, if you are perhaps

in naive, older class of feminist that imagines if women ran the world, everything would be

just much better and everything would be fairer and more just the message of this book

is no, actually, people who establish power greater than those around them will exploit

it simply because they can. I'm getting to a point in the book now where there's one political

character who realizes that people are much more attuned to power dynamics and they want

...