Huge thanks to all who have recommended summer reading. The criteria were that it had to be a paperback that could be left behind in the holiday house or hotel if necessary, and also an improving but easy read. This is the selection.

Non-fiction:

The Snowball by Alice Schroeder

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman;

Treasure Islands by Nicholas Shaxson

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

Enough is Enough by Fintan O’Toole

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry and Invention by William Rosen

Parisians by Graham Robb

Aftershock by Philippe Legrain

Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking over the World by Angela Saini

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

The Truth About Markets by John Kay

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

The Secret Life of France by Lucy Wadham

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (“A perennial reminder that ‘truth’ is a working hypothesis. The neo-lib, neo-con, economic model of the past 30 years looks seriously flawed. Think a new paradigm is emerging….,” says the recommender.)

Chinese Lessons by Brian Pomfret

Dear Undercover Economist by Tim Harford (“A quick dip in and out the pool.”)

SuperFreakonomics by Levitt and Dubner (“On the beach.”)

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (“Nothing on’t telly.”)

The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb (“For the unexpected holiday twist.”)

Fiction:

The Dinosaur Feather by Sissel-Jo Gazan

One Day by David Nicholls (“If you graduated at any time in the 1980s then this is your book!  Laugh out loud funny in many places, it also moves you to tears.  My new mission in life is to seek out anyone of our generation who hasn’t yet read this, and make them do so!” says the recommender.)

The Upright Piano Player by David Abbott

Ghost Light by Joseph O’Connor

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (“Best book I have ever read – life changer,” says this recommender.)

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford (the publisher says this is non-fiction but it’s as gripping a read as any novel.)

The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe.

Thanks to @brighteconomist, @lcf467, @paulstpancras, @marob23, @dirkvl, @spaceapes, @tawalton, @nextwavefutures, @brandsarebest, @mattflood and @ruskin147 on Twitter, and Rupert on this blog, for all of these. More welcome in comments (which should be much easier with this software than on the previous blog software I was using).

Yesterday I started writing a review of The God Species by Mark Lynas, and posted a brief comment about it here. I noticed that Amazon had an odd message saying the book (but not the Kindle edition) was unavailable because of a customer complaint that the item was “not as described.” It did cross my mind that this was a trick by a disgruntled environmentalist unhappy about the book’s pragmatic recommendations. Today, Mark Lynas and a rapidly growing number of people on Twitter have woken up to the apparent censorship, unwitting or not, by Amazon. Martin Robbins in The Guardian points out that maybe there was a faulty print run, but if so Amazon have not told the author or publisher about the problem, and nor are they responding to journalists’ calls or the Twitter snowball so far today.

So, without pre-empting my review, I’ll say it’s well worth reading the book if you’re at all interested in sustainability, and it’s available from Waterstones and Blackwells. Mark Lynas himself has commented on the affair.

This is, of course, if it proves to be effective censorship, a good example of the kind of consumer detriment caused by the increasing re-concentration of the book retailing market. When I was on the Competition Commission inquiry into this market a few years ago, Amazon was the competitive upstart which effectively persuaded us that Waterstones and Ottakars should be permitted to merge. Online dynamics mean that Amazon has become the incumbent with market power by now. Time for consumers to diversify to other online retailers – or indeed back to physical bookstores?

I’m reviewing The God Species by Mark Lynas for The Independent, so will not post a review here. But it did underline for me the convergence of debate between economists and environmentalists about sustainability and the impact of humans on the planet as a whole. Until quite recently I would have said the perspectives of the two disciplines could not possibly converge, with economists fundamentally believing that if a trend is unsustainable, it will not be sustained because people’s behaviour would change in response to incentives, and environmentalists fundamentally gloomier about the scope for self-correction.

However, I’m starting to think there is a real effort on both sides to reach a mutual understanding about sustainability. I’d put my own The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters in this basket, alongside some economics books more directly concerned with climate change – Nick Stern’s Blueprint for a Safer Planet comes to mind. Mark Lynas’s book is an environmental campaigner’s pragmatic effort to include economic tools in the kit of responses needed to avert catastrophic environmental change.

I’ll link to my review when it’s out in The Independent.

PS A note to regular readers – I hope you like the new format. We made a software and server switch, which is why the blog has been quiet this week. Feedback is welcome – I’ll be making a few more changes. There will also be links to Amazon as it seems to make sense to join the affiliates programme – the only one available at present.

This morning's Financial Times features its recommendations for summer reading. I always enjoy lists of books, and all the more so this time as it includes The Economics of Enough. There are several economics and business, and also politics, books on the list I'd like to catch up with this summer. For example, Paul Allen's memoir Idea Man is one, along with Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order. This looks intriguing too:

And my new boss, BBC Trust Chairman Lord Patten, is recommending Off Message by Bob Marshall Andrews, so I shall certainly read that.

But here's the question for readers of this blog. Can we draw up our own list of summer recommendations? Rather than restricting it to newish hardbacks, the rule is paperbacks that can be left behind in the holiday house, and that are intellectually stimulating without being hard work. Please comment here or send me a tweet (@diane1859), and I'll compile a list.

The BBC has posted the archive of transcripts and talks from the Reith Lecture Series, which started in 1948 with Bertrand Russell and this year features Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi. It's a complete treasure trove and I started with John Kenneth Galbraith's 1966 lecture on The New Industrial State.

It sent me back to browsing the book and, of course, considering the parallels between then and now. The figures he gives for concentration in the US economy at the time are still staggering: at the end of 1974, the biggest 200 manufacturing firms in the US (less than a tenth of one percent of the total number) held two thirds of all assets and accounted for three fifths of all sales.  I wonder what the corresponding figures today would be – one would want to include services as well as manufacturing, but the picture would be no less concentrated, for sure.

In many ways the book of course reflects its times – the Cold War, and the corresponding emphasis on the 'military-industrial complex'. But some of its themes remain relevant, including the relationship between technology, capital requirements and economic organisational forms, and between economic power and political power. This is a lesson we have painfully re-learnt since the financial crisis, thanks in no small part to economists such as Simon Johnson.

I'm not a fan of J.K.Galbraith's work. I've always found the rhetoric insufficiently rooted in evidence, and his prose rather pompous. In short, the books are too woolly and full of purple prose. I once met the great man, when I was a graduate student at Harvard, and felt simply too short to be of any interest to him – so maybe that explains my antipathy.

Still, his emphasis on the link between economics and politics is certainly right, and so well worth taking to heart is Galbraith's point about the gap between the romantic (Anglo-Saxon) view of the economy as a competitive field of small enterprises and the reality of large corporations wielding power. As he notes, the myth is an ideological one, and not one most economists subscribed to at the time – or now either, even if much of the profession was diverted down that path by the political spirit of the 1980s.