For several weeks, poetry has topped my reading list. Rediscovering ‘The Spirit Level’ is one of many delights. A work of great power, this eight-year-old book was Heaney’s first after he’d put a Nobel Prize under his belt.

A book I return to endlessly. It’s about a future we need now.

Oh yes. At last! Another one for the Safari Bookshelf, to be pillaged online.

Not quite, but a fine stand-in for a similar Blake collection edited by J. Bronowski (now out of print)

1969, still around, really hard to find though. And that’s … insanity!
Indispensable ‘Underground’.

One of the few self-help books that have ever struck me as well worth reading, this is ideal material to be discovered on line at the Safari Bookshelf. A full review from ‘http://bookzen.blogspot.com/">bookzen’ provides a good introduction to it.

At a time when much of my attention’s devoted to signs of a ‘Quiet Revolution’, this became indispensable reading on the strength of a review by Simon Waldman: ‘This is a gripping snapshot of a period of profound change; and since the book was finished, at least half a dozen incidents have taken place to further prove his point… Anyone plotting the future for a media organisation – or any organisation that deals with the media – would be foolish to do so without first reading Gillmor’s book’ (The Guardian, November 2004)

Mind-bending SF combined with a sharp, accurate sense of history are MacDonald hallmarks. In ‘Shaka’ and its sequel ‘Kirinya’, he got east Africa right as a setting for a very strange future. In ‘River of Gods’, he takes on the challenge of ‘Midnight’s Children’ for a 100th birthday festival of a blockbuster. Ever thought of Shiva, Kali & Co as software?