Hello, my name's David Rundsman 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, whose summer sale with the Paris Review, two subscriptions for one low price,

is open to Talking Politics listeners. Head to

LRB.com.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 Alderman'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.

And 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 feminists 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

...