Outrageous, iconic and unforgettable - these are some of the books Penguin have been publishing over its 90-year history. As part of a special content series called 'The books that shaped us' on Penguin.co.uk, we invited readers from the world of publishing, comedy, and music to explore must-read titles across the decades. The Internet's resident librarian Jack Edwards and Penguin editor Simon Prosser discuss their curated reading lists, and explore the impact of the books that shocked society and became pop culture phenomena in this special episode, recorded live at Waterstones Picadilly
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Alongside the Penguin books mentioned Irvine, Derek and readers at Latitude recommended:
The Penguin Podcast live at Waterstones transcript
Rhianna Dhillon:
Hi everybody. I am Rhianna Dillon, welcome to Ask Penguin. It's the podcast series from Penguin Books. It's the show that takes you inside books and publishing. So welcome to this very special podcast episode coming to you from the biggest bookshop in Europe. Did you guys know that? The regulars knew it. So we're recording in Waterstone's Piccadilly, right in the heart of London. So since 1935, penguin has published books that have shaped the world that we live in. So as part of a special content series on penguin.co.uk, the Penguin team have been delving in to nine decades worth of penguin books and selecting titles that have shocked us, comforted us, set our imaginations alight alongside co-editors from the worlds of books, music, and also comedy, politics, they've created reading lists that explore the topics that have shaped the world that we live in today.
So for this conversation, we wanted to dive into two of those themes with the people who championed those very special titles. These are the books that have shocked us as a society, influenced the way that writers approach their work and changed what we see in modern bookshops, the titles that have leapt off the page into art, music, cinema, even the way that we speak. So a massive hello to everybody here in person today, and to everybody listening at home, we're delighted to have you with us. So joining me to discuss the stories behind these standout titles from the last 90 years, I'm delighted to welcome Simon Prosser and Jack Edwards.
Thank you so much for joining us both. So Simon is the publishing director of publishing Imprint Hamish Hamilton and the editor of so many prize winning writers. Names like Zadie Smith, Bernadine Evaristo, Ali Smith, Arundhati Roy, Robert Macfarlane, Hanif Kureishi to name just a few there. And Jack Edwards is known as the Internet's resident librarian, a cultural catalyst. Jack's audience of 3 million people of earned him a place as one of the most influential names in book history. He's creator in Residence for Hay Festival, a keynote speaker at Singapore Writers Festival and Gothenburg Book Fair, and the digital host of the Booker Prize, and recently launched his own book club, Inklings, which is a special community of book lovers, so thank you so much for joining us both.
Jack Edwards:
Thanks for having us.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Welcome to the podcast. So, both of you have been involved in pulling together these incredible lists that we've been talking about. What was it about the themes of the books that excited you and where on earth did you start selecting your favourites to even compile a list? Simon, let's start with you.
Simon Prosser:
Well, I had some help because there were people on the Penguin team who had some strong ideas of books. But I suppose for me, a lot of it goes back to why I work at Penguin in the first place. So I've worked at Penguin for over 25 years, and one of the reasons I so wanted to work at Penguin was growing up surrounded by Penguin books. They were on my parents' shelves. Indeed, quite a few of the books that were in my list were books that I first read first encountered there. So it was very easy actually to think of those books that I suppose you could look at as shocking in various ways, but books that made a kind of impact that shocked in some sense, and maybe we'll talk later about what the different kinds of ways you can shock. But yeah, those books and indeed some of the books that were on Jack's list as well. And there's a bit of an overlap, I think, in books that could have been on either list or both list. So yeah, they came quite easily.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Jack, what about you?
Jack Edwards:
So my list was books that have shaped pop culture. And so in order to start to narrow down my list, I really thought about if we didn't have this then we wouldn't have this. To give you an example, Pride and Prejudice, if we didn't have Pride and Prejudice, we wouldn't have Bridgette Jones' diary and we wouldn't have Bridgeton. And so that was really interesting to me. If we didn't have Lord of the Flies, we wouldn't have Yellow Jackets, we wouldn't have LOST.
So I thought about that to start with. Then I thought about books that have kind of added to the lexicon, even the fact that we can describe things as Homeric referring to Homer, Orwellian relating to George Orwell, Kafkaesque relating to Franz Kafka. I started to think about how books have become part of our cultural expression. And so that was another way that I started to piece this together. And then of course, pop culture references, Taylor Swift saying she's feeling so Gatsby, or Lana Del Rey quoting Lolita, the Rolling Stones, one of their album covers, they're all bugs in reference to Metamorphosis. So I was thinking about a lot of those things and the list sort of took shape and then they said, you can only have 10. And I said, what? And so then there was a little bit of revision that happened, but I could have made a hundred.
Rhianna Dhillon:
But that's it. We always hear about writers sort of tinkering or it’s like, how do you know when to stop writing? I mean, that's partly your job, Simon, tell 'em to stop writing. But how did you know that you'd finalised the list? How did you know? You'd just be like, okay, take it away from me?
Jack Edwards:
That's the great thing about being a social media creator. No one can tell you to stop. The YouTube video is as long as I want it to be. So yeah, it was interesting having to cut things down, but then you really distil the lists to which have had the most cultural impact. It was a fun process.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Did you enjoy the process, Simon?
Simon Prosser:
I did very much. And also having the opportunity to go back to these books, think about them again. In some cases, actually in almost all cases now read them again
Because you think you can know a book and actually in a sense you do, but we change and the way we read books changes over time. Obviously we remember certain things, we don't remember others, we hear things about books. They change the way that we think we know them. So I spent the long weekend partly rereading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and it really isn't quite the book that I remember. I mean it still is. You can see why it shocked for sure, but there were things in it that I literally don't remember at all and are super interesting to me. And also it's probably shocking now in ways that actually might surprise people or things that were acceptable then are shocking now. It's really interesting.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Jack, can you talk a little bit about what really excites you about the relationship between pop culture and books and also how your fans have responded to the list that you've put out there?
Jack Edwards:
Yeah, it's kind of the genesis of my book content online, really thinking about pop culture because I sort of started to talk about books on YouTube during the pandemic when I had just graduated into COVID and the whole mess that was, and was falling back in love with reading myself.
And so I think that my audience, my viewers, resonated with that pursuit of trying to fall back in love with reading and assigning yourself a curriculum outside of education and outside of being told you have to read this, saying actually, I want to read this. And so the way that I did that was by sort of meeting people where they were. So I made videos about all of the book references on Harry Style's first album. There's a lot, to Murakami, to Bukowski on his second album, the song Watermelon Sugar takes its name from a Richard Brautigan novel. He used to open his tours by playing a poem by Charles Bukowski called Style, and sort of interplaying that with the intro to Golden. So really these references are everywhere. BTS, a lot of their music videos are inspired by literature. Those Who Walk Away From Omelas, the short story by Ursula K. Le Guin inspires one of their music videos. Taylor Swift has a lot of references, so I would sort of try to meet people where they were, okay, maybe you're already interested in the TV shows Sex Education on Netflix or something like that. There's actually a lot of books in that show or the White Lotus, they often use books as props. How can we think about books in the context of pop culture and all fall back in love with it together? I'm enthralled. It's been a love affair ever since
Simon Prosser:
It gives me such pleasure to hear. I can't tell you. It is wonderful. And I think just as you were talking, I can think of all sorts of other cases, but it is really great to, what did you say, meet it where it is, where they are, and then move from there.
Jack Edwards:
And you don't need to know these references either. If you do, it just adds texture. So when that new Taylor Swift album drops on the 3rd of October, I will be there at midnight waiting for all the references. We already know there's a Hamlet reference. I am locked in, don't talk to me until the fifth. Thank you.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So Simon, as you said, your list is focused on books that shock society. And as you mentioned with Lady Chatterley, for example, things that shock us now might be very different to what shocked us 90 years ago. What do you think has changed the most drastically since then?
Simon Prosser:
I was thinking about this earlier, and I guess maybe you could think about shock in two ways. One is that shock in terms of societal, more so what's susceptible, what can be said, what can't be said, what's scandalous, what's not scandalous. And I think we can very clearly see why, for example, lady Chatterley’s Lover was scandalous at the time and Lawrence knew it. He wrote that book towards the end of his life and he published it himself because he knew no one else would publish it. And the reasons are sort of, they're all several fold, but they're related. One is he wanted to include four letter words, the C word, the F word, words that simply would not be printed. And secondly, he wanted to describe sexuality in a very, very frank way. And he wanted to describe sexuality across the classes, which I think was really shocking actually.
And it shouldn't have been, but it was so he knew what he was doing and it is shocking. It's shocking to think how shocked people were actually, in a way, you read his book, and, actually, when I reread it, what struck me is there's very little that you would describe as exactly erotic or certainly pornographic. What I didn't know was in the book there are, for example, very long attempts to describe what the female orgasm might feel like as a woman. And that I don't remember at all, but it's super interesting. It's really interesting. On the other hand, there are things that are shocking. And for example, it is incredibly phallo centric. The phallus, he's obsessed by the phallus, all the way through. It gives it a kind of pagan significance that is quite shocking to read. And there are a couple of references that you probably wouldn't get away with now in relation, and shouldn't get away with now in relation to other matters.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Interesting.
Simon Prosser:
So that's one kind of shock. The other shock I was thinking is the shock of realisation. So it's another meaning of shock when something is revealed to you, it might make you angry, it might make you alarmed or it might other things. And I think there we haven't changed. So the Hiroshima, which we'll probably talk about, that's a book that reveals a truth about something that was concealed from us about effectively humanity, let's say. And I think there are all sorts of things going on in the world now that we don't know the full extent of, that were they revealed in these kinds of literary ways would still shock us. We could be talking about a war, we could be talking about a genocide, we could be talking about individual acts of in humanity. Those things remain shocking and they always will, I hope, as that's what makes us human. We're shocked by these things. So that's what I was thinking.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Where do you think that the place of books is in that ability to provoke? Where should they be, at least in today's society?
Simon Prosser:
I certainly don't think all books should provoke at all, but I think that great writers sometimes will want to provoke us. And it might be that, I mean to take an example of just someone I published called Han Kang. So Kang won the Nobel Prize recently, and one of the reasons is that what she does is she absolutely addresses humanity in general. What is it that makes this a species that's capable of both acts of enormous love, but also acts of unspeakable cruelty that seems to define us, but specifically in South Korea, what she's doing and has done in her novels in two cases, including the last novel, is through the novels drop us back in time to massacres that happened that are simply not part of official history. They're quite recent, they're within the last 40 years let's say, but they're there in her work and she brings everything that the novels can do to make us really feel them. She's both memorialising them and recording them and making sure they don't escape history, but she's also allowing us to have a human response to these real human beings that these things happen to.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And Jack now in the 21st century, we consume so much from film, social media. So where do you think that books kind of lie in that landscape of being able to get conversations started and also to shock or to change a moment?
Jack Edwards:
Yeah, I think that we can often discredit young people, especially when we think about social media. It's certainly an attention economy where we are competing for people's interests and people's attention. And we can do that through superlatives and through quick snappy videos that are 15 seconds to one minute long. But I've been really reassured by the reading community that I found online that actually many young people are still interested in picking up a novel, thumbing the pages and lingering with something. And I recently set up my own book club, which is called Inklings, and it's been a really magical experience to orchestrate that, but then let people run with it and see how fascinated people were by the book and spending a whole month on one piece of media, like you said, we can consume and consume and consume so much. The number of faces that we see and the number of opinions and takes and thoughts and perspectives we see every time we pick up our phones is, I don't know if the human brain is wired for that. And books almost feel like the antithesis right? To sit down and just walk a novel in someone else's shoes for 300, 400, 500 pages. So I've been really reassured by the community of especially young people that I have online and that I'm part of online to know that I've got faith that we're still reading. And yeah, we are bringing books back. Books are having a longer shelf life because book tok, book tube, feel like a meritocracy in a way. There's lots of different perspectives. It's not about which book has the biggest marketing budget.
It's about which book resonated with the most people. And that's why to bring it back to the list, I chose books by Homer and one of the books that has had a huge resurgence on book tok is The Song of Achilles, which is a retelling of the Iliad. And so these books continue to resonate with new audiences just new ways.
Simon Prosser:
Yeah, I mean it strikes me that it's an incredibly good thing because it is absent of marketing, but I mean I don't know who I would pay in order to get it on there. And I dunno who on book tok I would pay the money to make any of these things happen. So they feel very democratic, democratic, very organic and very real. So it's a good thing.
Jack Edwards:
And one of those authors I hope everyone picks up is Han Kang because those novels are just absolutely captivating and I've learned so much about Korean history and from those and I'm kind of in awe that you worked on those.
Simon Prosser:
I'm in awe myself. Very lucky. No, we're very lucky.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That's our first proper recommendation of the night. We are going to come to many more. So over 10,000 people voted for their favourite book within each reading list. And Jack, you picked 1984 as your topic pick of books that really impacted pop culture and readers agreed. That book took an overwhelming majority of the votes.
Jack Edwards:
I mean it's always a relief. Maybe I do you know what I'm talking about after all?
Rhianna Dhillon:
Huh? I think you just might Jack. So why is it your favourite?
Jack Edwards:
This book changed my life and continues to, that's the reason I'm on this stage because I read Animal Farm at school and I came home to my mom and I said, this is rocking my world. This has knocked my socks off and I want more of it. And my mom bought me this copy of 1984, actually this exact edition here where the cover and the title is redacted, which is a very genius design because the book is all about surveillance and censorship of ideas and also of words. So to have the title blocked out like that, I think the perfect cover does exist and it's that one. Anyway, my mom bought me a copy. Mine is no longer redacted because it's been in so many tote bags and so many backpacks and so many suitcases and moving boxes.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I love it. There's a video of you online with it on the penguin website.
Jack Edwards:
The redacted part is rubbed out. And actually you can now see the title because it's just been so worn. This book I think taught me what you can do with the written word, what you can do with letters printed on a page in black and white, that you can be thought provoking, that you can be galvanising, that you can dissect the world that you see, but also shape the world you're stepping into. It introduced the term Big Brother, which I think we would now all understand that that meant a kind of surveillance. It introduced the concept of room 1 0 1, a place where your worst fear, your individualised worst fear sits waiting for you and is a sort of torture method. And terms like newspeak groupthink. I think too today about the way that we use language, those of you who have the dexterity with TikTok will know that people will say unalived instead of died. And that's insane to me that we do that to avoid algorithms silencing us. And isn't that what 1984 is about? So the fact that it's just as pertinent every day right now as it was when it was written, I think has cemented its place in literary history.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Just about the unlive thing. How many people are aware of that term?
Jack Edwards:
There's some hands. There's lots of hands.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah, it's a lot of hands. So it really has come into our everyday talk.
Jack Edwards:
Yeah, I mean it's crazy to me. That's right. And I think this book speaks to it, and George Orwell would be horrified with a scroll on TikTok for many reasons, I think.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And Simon, 1984 was also on your list of books that shocked the world.
Simon Prosser:
It was, and I mean I think it's an incredible book for all the reasons Jack just said. And what's so interesting about it to me is also the way it holds up a kind of mirror to the reader every single time. Whether it was when the book was first published or you can read it now, it still holds that mirror up. And I think what he's saying, what the mirror is saying to us or allowing us to feel is that, or to know is that it's up to us, like, this thing, this nightmare that he's described so brilliantly. It's all possible. It's all still possible unless we're there to stop it happening. And I was sort of looking at it earlier and thinking, did Orwell ever think that himself? And actually at the very end of his life, he said the moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one. Don't let it happen. It depends on you. That's what he thought the book was and that strikes me as incredible. That's why it's still so fresh. It's a wonderful book because it's both a political book and also it works as a novel, doesn't it? It's amazing.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I mean, so it's 76 years old, I think published in 1949, still feels so incredibly relevant. Why do you think it has endured, why do you think that people are still reading it, are still voting it their number one book?
Simon Prosser:
It's extraordinarily timeless because it takes, he understood totalitarianism, he knew communism, he knew Stalinism, he knew the factions within it, fascism, he knew it all and he could see where it was going. And it's a warning.
Rhianna Dhillon:
As an editor, Simon, has there been a book that has really surprised you with its impact that sort of just came a bit out of left field?
Simon Prosser:
There are a couple of books and they're strikingly relevant to the other books we're describing. Actually the first one is a book I published early on just after I joined Penguin, actually Hamish Hamilton, because I'd been an academic publisher before I knew the work of Noam Chomsky and he didn't have a mainstream publisher, so I took him on and the first book was called Hegemony or Survival, and it was published in 2003. And I sort of thought, well, we might sell a few thousand copies. He's got a hardcore base of fans, people like me would buy it. And in fact, despite having the word ‘hegemony’ in the title, it went on to sell I think about a quarter million copies, something like that. And what it did very, very simply for those who don't know it, it just said the United States very clearly, it wants to rule the world.
Hegemony means I think being in charge, leading, dominating, it means domination. And he very clearly just went through the ways in which the United States attempted to do this, the places it's done it, the wars that resulted, you can probably guess a lot of what’s in there and put it all together and he said part of this is the danger of the proliferation of nuclear weapons and hence survival. We have to protest this or we won't survive. And it's strikingly relevant now. But that really stunned me and really encouraged me that that book sold so well. And the second one was 10 years later and it was Dave Eggers book The Circle in 2013. Does anyone know the circle?
You do. Okay. It's interesting. So few people do. It was how long ago now? 12 years ago. What's striking about the book? It's an internet novel in a way, and it's kind of 1984 influenced, and it's about a young woman who goes to work for a tech company in Silicon Valley, and it's one of those tech companies that provides all the services you could possibly want. You never have to leave the campus, they love you so much and you’re so well paid people fight to go and work there. And she works there, she gets there and one of the things that they're doing is they're obsessed by the idea of everyone being transparent, there being no privacy. And she drinks the Kool-Aid and she goes on in, and I won't say more, but it is a really well done satire I guess, of where we're heading. So it's very related to other books. And again, I thought Eggers definitely had a following. I thought it would do well, but it did incredibly well. And still today in the international markets, it's one of our top 10 books, so that was a surprise.
Jack Edwards:
Yeah, you were saying about the books with stressful words to say in the title. I remember going to uni and being given a copy of The Ecclesiastical History of the English Speaking People and being like, okay, so step one is learn how to pronounce ecclesiastical. I've got a degree in saying ecclesiastical, it's by Bede. And the funny thing about Durham where I went to university is Bede is buried in the cathedral. And so my tutorials about this book took place next to the cathedral, and so when the tutorial leader would speak about Bede, she would point, and it wasn't until after I realised, oh, she's pointing at his dead body. She'd be like, oh, as Bede said and gesture towards him, which I thought was quite neat.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Are there any markers for you, Jack, or are there any ways that you can predict if a book is really going to resonate with readers?
Jack Edwards:
I think for want of a better word, it comes down to vibes. And I last year made a video on TikTok about White Knights by Dostoevsky, which I read and completely fell in love with. And I actually bought it by accident because I was trying to buy a book called White Knights, the same title, a book that was nominated for that year's International Booker Prize. It was by Polish writer. And so I ordered the wrong book and I was like, well, I have it now and it's only 80 pages and I loved Crime and Punishment, so I'll give it a go. And I remember finishing that book and just slamming it shut, head in my hands. I can't believe how marvellous this is and how relevant it feels today, even though it was written in 1848. And it's about kind of unrequited love and the way that we project our emotions onto the object of our affections and maybe that's not who they really are. All this to say I made a TikTok about it being like, guys, I can't believe how great this book is. And it went on to become the fourth biggest selling translation of last year even though it was written in 1848. And I can't really take credit for that because ultimately it's the fact that this book just has stood the test of time. And I always think about what Greta Gerwig said when she adapted Little Women for the screen. Someone asked her, how did you make Little Women feel so modern? And she said, I didn't make Little Women feel modern. I excavated it for what was modern about it. And I think that the same was true for White Knights, that there's so much that is modern about that book and just as relevant today as it was then, I assume, I wasn't around. But I think that sometimes it can really surprise you which books will resonate so widely.
Simon Prosser:
It is so wonderful to hear that. One of the things that's probably pretty obvious about my job is that you have to be an incredible optimist. You have to really believe that the books you're publishing are going to find an audience and you reassure the authors of that. And sometimes it simply doesn't happen and it's very, very hard and it's very, very sad. But one of the things I do say is we cannot know whether this book will be picked up in, someone might discover it in 10 years time. And that does happen. And you've just given a brilliant example. I wish they happened more and to really great books.
Jack Edwards:
It will. I do believe that, but people should not to be worried or intimidated by the classics because they are classics for a reason. Often you also don't have to like it, even though it is a classic, even though it has a gorgeous cloth bound cover, you don't have to like it. You can still engage critically with it. And the writing of Jane Austen, her humour holds up today. It's just as funny. And you can find so much brilliance in those books and still read them in a modern way.
Simon Prosser:
It's funny, when I was rereading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence seemingly really hated Jane Austen and there's a bit in the book, but he's just savagely mercilessly ripping the piss out of her writing and he's got it so wrong.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Simon, there were two titles on your Shock Society list that I think really stood out in terms of what is happening today. So one was Hiroshima published in 1946, which was the first-hand account of the atomic bombing. So what was the impact on readers at the time?
Simon Prosser:
Yeah, Hiroshima is an incredible book by John Hersey. It was published at the end of 1946, and what happened is, so as many of you will know, the Americans, the allies, but in effects the Americans dropped a bomb on Hiroshima. And we now know it's pretty much instantly killed a hundred thousand people, razed the city to the ground. There was a blinding, unbelievably blinding flash of light and the people that happened to had absolutely no idea what had hit them, what it was. And immediately afterwards a bomb was dropped from Nagasaki five days later I think, and at which point the Japanese surrendered and the Americans and probably the rest of the allies went on to say, this is an amazing thing. We've did this. And it stopped war, it ended the war. There was a lot of almost boastful talk about the technicalities, like the incredible, because they're also trying to show the Russians actually, we now know, look at this thing that we can do.
What wasn't talked about at all was the human impact, what this actually did to this city and the people. So the New Yorker, which remains a brilliant magazine, but it was even more brilliant back in those days. The editor there commissioned John Hersey, who was a very fine writer, novelist and reporter, and said, go to Hiroshima and write about it. So he went a year afterwards and he decided that what he would do, he read a book on the way that I think focused on five or six people, a novel, and he thought, I've got an idea, I will find six people who were there when this happened, who survived. And that's what the book is, it's his reporting of what they told him. And the other decision he made was to tell it in completely unemotional language. So he just tells it very clearly and crisply and sometimes, I never found it cold, but it has been called cold.
And there's a reason for that. So that these words just speak directly to you. What happens speaks directly to you, these six people's experiences, and it's absolutely horrifying what's happened to them and you feel that horror. So as soon as they came in, the New Yorker editor realised, what he said was, this is an amazing piece of writing. They were going to serialise it over four issues and instead he said, we're going to make this the whole issue of the New Yorker. It was 35,000 words and they just ran out as the whole issue. It was a sensation. Einstein tried to buy a hundred copies of it, it's sold out everywhere. The American publisher said, we'll do it as a book exactly as is. And Penguin said, we'll do the same. And this is the first edition actually. This is what it looked like.
It stood out really well. And they printed, first run of this was 250,000 copies, a quarter of a million copies, and it sold out very, very fast. So it's a super unusual book that just lifted the lid on something that hadn't been revealed and did it absolutely brilliantly. It's a, it's still taught very widely, it's masterclass in rapport reportage, and there's a type of American journalism called the New Journalism from people like Tom Wolfe, you may have heard of him, and he's not quite that, but he's seen as a precursor of that. But it still hits, I've read it again on Thursday. It's amazing.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah. Do you think that we still have the ability to be shocked in the same way by firsthand accounts, given that we have, as we were talking about, so much access now to videos.
Simon Prosser:
I strongly think we do. I think that you can respond to a video in a way out of context and you can be horrified, shocked, whatever you are, but it doesn't have much context. And sometimes you don't know the story behind that person. What hurts it shows is these people have lives, they had children, and we get a bit of that in what we see on the news right now. But yeah, I'm sure I'm absolutely certain that a book could do this and I can think of some very obvious recent conflicts or ongoing conflicts where that could and should be the case.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And another one that you picked was Refugees published in 1960. So tell us a bit more about this book and why you chose it.
Simon Prosser:
This book is super interesting. It was commissioned by U-N-H-C-R in 1960. Some people will know it. Kay, there was Kay Webb who wrote it and she went on to become the founder and editor of Puffin Books. She was married to Ronald Sowell who drew. So he was a great artist and they were definitely both progressive and they were commissioned to go to Europe and to visit refugee camps. And these are refugee camps, housing people, some of whom left from the Second World War and some of whom had come as a result of the salutation of Eastern Europe. And very simply, they went around and drew and talked to some people, representative people that they met, put them in this book, and the book was published and the stated aim was to force the British government to take in more refugees who weren't supposedly young fit and able bodied, because basically if you were over 24 and you were a refugee, they didn't want you, they just wanted young people. So it's about everyone else. It's a great piece of publishing.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Fantastic. Jack, there was something similar on your list. So the classic In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. So for those who aren't familiar with the story, it's a fictionalised account of the murders of the Clutter family. Tell us a bit more about that and why you think it really impacted popular culture.
Jack Edwards:
So the story is that these two men broke into a house hoping to rob them, but ended up committing a quadruple murder of the entire Clutter family. This is something that really happened. And then Truman Capote found out about this case. He had written Breakfast at Tiffany's, which you might be familiar with, and he basically wrote what is essentially a nonfiction novel. So it's a novelization of true events. And he was also very involved with interviewing the two murderers while they were on death row and they were later hanged. It's interesting because the book sort of has its own mythology, right? There's a story, but then there's the story of the story because it's also really interesting how Truman Capote became personally involved and reportedly had a kind of relationship with one of the men. And so there was also an emotional investment there as well, which may have altered the way that he told the story. So the book is fascinating both in terms of its contents and then also its history, which I found fascinating. But for me, the reason I put it on my list of books that have impacted pop culture is because really it's the first example we have of true crime.
There's so much content online and documentaries, so many documentaries of cases like this where we see not only the story of what happened, but also individual people then commenting on the story and sharing their perspectives. And also we think about the investigation. To me in Cold Blood has shaped culture for sure.
Rhianna Dhillon:
It does feel very human and very emotion led, but how do you think that the way that we read about True Crime, write about it, hear about it? How do you think that genre has changed since 1966 when this was published?
Jack Edwards:
I think that we are all nosy, fundamentally. It's really interesting. There are some great books that discuss the true crime craze. Death of a Bookseller is a good one,
Penance by Eliza Clark is a great one. There is sort of like a fictionalised version of this, of what went down here where it's about someone looking into a true crime case, the murder of a school girl by her school friends. And the book kind of takes the form of the investigation into the investigation, if that makes sense. Again, it kind of critiques and analyses the true crime craze and this idea that we forget that these are real people that we're talking about and that we kind of get caught up and lost in the plot and the who done it and forget that the people you accuse are real people who have real families who may read those comments that you leave on videos and speculating on someone's real life and potentially the real murder of a real person can be extremely insensitive. So I suppose I'm really interested in that kind of public spectacle that true crime can generate. I don't think that true crime is an inherently bad thing. It's important that we continue to learn about the awful things humans are capable of, but I suppose it's about how we interact with it. And I think that this book lends itself well to that discourse.
Rhianna Dhillon:
The Fault in Our Stars is perhaps the most recent one on your list, Jack, which is such a brilliant one in terms of pop culture. But tell us why you chose that, how you landed on it.
Jack Edwards:
This was the one book on my list that I really ruminated on for a while because I couldn't decide whether it belonged there
And then almost the fact that I had sat and had that conversation with myself was what made me certain that it did belong because it is a little incongruous with the rest of them. It's much more modern of course, but also it would accommodate for a young adult audience and I suppose it would be considered to be young adult. I think that that label for the genre is interesting in and of itself because really what young adult means is that it is kind of from that age up. I don't think that there's a cap on when you should stop reading young adult fiction. I think of books like The Curious Instant of the Dog in the Nighttime, which I think everyone should read. Same with The Fault in our Stars. They do cater to a younger audience, but it doesn't mean that adults shouldn't read them too. I think that for me, The Fault in our Stars is emblematic of the online book community to me. I dunno about for anyone else, but I was a Tumblr boy and this was the first book I saw people being excited about. That wasn't something that we'd read in school or that I'd read as a child. I was a teenager and it was a book that I wanted to read in my free time in the same way that I would go and see films or listened to music in my free time.
This was the first book that I did that and then that led to maybe the Hunger Games and all sorts of things like that. The fault in our Stars I think is proof that young adult fiction can be literary, it can be complex, it can be written sentimentally and in an ornate embellished way. It taught me what a metaphor was, but also it's persisted and I think it continues to be a key part of the culture and book Tube, book tok book and Instagram. If you can put book in front of it, I will. But truly this book has stood the test of time and I think that it's inspired a new generation of writers. So for me it does belong in that list and I'm glad to have that there.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah. What do you think now shocks younger readers who haven't, perhaps if you're talking about people who grew up reading Lady Chatterley or were encouraged from a young age to read a lot of those books, we perhaps might not be so shocked now, but if you're coming in to reading, as you say from school, you haven't had access to necessarily this holdback catalogue. What do you think are the things that are really standing out to young readers as particularly shocking in today's society?
Jack Edwards:
Well, firstly, I just want to show of hands in the room who had a John Green phase or John Green Life. So it's like most of us. Okay, cool. That was very validating. That was a lot of us, but listeners, what's shocking us or interesting us now? I think the dystopias, I think they still were for a lot of us, the gateway into reading. The Hunger Games nearly made my list. But I chose 1984 because I felt like, again, without 1984 we wouldn't have the Hunger Games and it sort of paved the way. I think the same is true for the Handmaid's Tale, which has had a huge cultural impact. But I think that again, 1984 paved the path for that. We had this huge boom of Greek mythological retellings too, like I mentioned with Song of Achilles, but also the work of Natalie Haynes, Jennifer Saints, all sorts of incredible writers who brought a feminist retelling or a queer retelling to classic literature. Last year we saw Huckleberry Finn be rewritten as James by Percival Everett. So I think that we are looking at history through a new lens, thinking about the stories that we've been told, but also the stories we weren't told who did we hear, but who did we not hear in Huckleberry Finn? It was Jim the enslaved who was the character who wasn't given a voice and Percival Everett so deftly and expertly did in James. And in a way it's sort of like literary fan fiction, which I think is cool.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Actually, fan fiction is a really interesting topic because I think quite a few people are quite shocked about the way that Fanfiction has entered the room, I think rightly so. It's such an incredible space for writers to express themselves. But how has that kind of shaken the publishing community, if at all?
Simon Prosser:
Suppose you may be a better place to answer.
Jack Edwards:
Well, I think about like Julia by Sandra Newman, which is a retelling of 1984 from the perspective of Julia who is the sort of love interest, I suppose in the original book, but in this book has given her own backstory. I think, of Wide Sargasso Sea, which is the perspective of Bertha in Jane Eyre. So it's a really fascinating literary sub-genre in terms of how it's shaping the literary landscape. I like that we're looking not only laterally at what other people around us are reading, but also longitudinally at what people read before us, the history of literature and casting our minds back to what has come before us and how we continue to develop on that and grow. So I like that book talk and the book space isn't motivated by having to cover the most recent releases. It can be an excavation into the history, this rich history, this kind of tapestry of novels that we can go back through and thread. So it's a journey that we're all on together and I think that's a wonderful thing.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah. Where do you think the line is between a book which kind of picks up on the zeitgeist of the moment and propels forward versus a book which is creating something? Can you think of any recent examples of one or the other?
Jack Edwards:
I'm going to do it. Everyone knew I was going to do it. Sally Rooney. I think that Sally Rooney, one of the sort of few literary rock stars that we have right now who continues to beat herself at her own game. I think every time she releases something new, she's reinventing what it is to be Sally Rooney esque. This is a term like Kafka esque like Hellion. Her name is being used on the cover of books to describe other people's work. But I suppose the formlessness of the grammar in normal people has given a lot of other writers who have followed that book, an opportunity to experiment with grammar. Whether you like it or not, speech marks might be gone forever. No, I know my mom said that when she read Intermezzo, she sat with her pen and re-added the speech marks into the sections that were lacking.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Your mom's a legend.
Simon Prosser:
I've had this problem. I mean, I agree with every word you've said about Sally Rooney. I think Sally Roney is a brilliant writer and actually a lot of, she's obviously read a lot as well from the sort of modernist canon is there, but she does something really fresh and every book I think gets better and better. And I've had, by the way, I also published quite a few writers who don't use speech marks. And one time recently we got customer service, got in touch and said somebody had complained because they thought their book, it was a misprint, there was a printer's error and where all the quotation marks gone. But yeah, Rooney’s a great example of someone who's created their own zeitgeist probably without intentionally doing so actually, which is maybe the only way to do it.
Jack Edwards:
Anyone who has watched my YouTube channel also knows what I'm going to say. Chapter 12, beautiful World, Where Are You? The first few paragraphs talks about how throughout our lives the one thing that sort of preoccupies us is the people that we love, the people that we communicate or indeed miscommunicate with, the people that we have sex with. And so why not write about those things? Why should we not create art about love and heartbreak and loss and longing and yearning and sex? Why shouldn't those things be literary? They are. And to dismiss work that talks about our relationships and the way that we communicate with one another is to dismiss the truth of what human existence is.
Simon Prosser:
She’s right, and it's also exactly what Lawrence is doing and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The same thing. And he would put it probably in a similar way actually. He's like, why aren't you talking about these things? Which it specifically meant sex, love, what love really means, the relationship between a man and a woman. Honesty about that. And there is a kind of radical honesty to Sally Rooney that is like that while stylistically different. So it is wonderful to me that these things can chime across decades
Jack Edwards:
And she says maybe we are stupid, that we're just too obsessed with ourselves and too obsessed with each other too. On our deathbed, we probably won't be thinking about economies and war. We'll be thinking about the people that we love and the people that we communicated with and the people that we miscommunicated with. And so why shouldn't that be put on the page? And I think she's right and I think that that's giving a lot of younger generation of authors, specifically female authors, the permission to explore those themes, which is incredibly important. And so when I think they say Sally Rooneyesque, that's what they're referring to.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah, that's great. This might be a challenge. Before we go to audience questions, can you give us a book recommendation from Penguin's 90 years of publishing that you think everyone should have read? I'm going to say apart from 1984, I feel like that was
Jack Edwards:
It was going to be. I was like, should we race to see who can say it first?
Rhianna Dhillon:
We just say it. I feel apart from 1984, do you have one that you think everyone should read? I love how often this stumps people.
Jack Edwards:
Well, I will die on the hill that Sula by Toni Morrison is the best book of all time. And when I was writing my list, it wasn't a question of Will Toni Morrison belong the list. It was like, which one do I choose? And I actually chose the Bluest Eye because I think that it embodied the crisis that we are seeing right now of book banning and censorship because the Bluest Eye holds up a mirror to American society and racism so pointedly that a lot of conservatives in America have been very afraid of the power of that book and have found odd little reasons to try to ban it. So I think that that book was the one I wanted to be on my list.
But for me, I think maybe Beloved is the one that most people would study in schools. Jazz I think is her most technically brilliant, but Sula ticks every box, it covers every theme imaginable and just speaks so truly to I think the human condition, what it is to be alive.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Incredible. Simon.
Simon Prosser:
It's a completely impossible question to which 1984 is the only answer because it is just the one book that clearly kind of does something so special. But no, of course there are many, many, many books because Penguin published the classics list as well. There are so many books there. I dunno. Flaubert has Madam Bovary or I know Kafka’s The Trial or I mean Toni Morrison's a brilliant call. W.G Seabald. I mean there are so many riches. So I'm just going to go with 1984.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Okay, fine. I'll let you have 1984. Simon, I really hope that you've been inspired by at least some if not all of the books that we've mentioned. You can find the reading lists created by Simon and Jack along with loads of others on the Penguin website. You just need to click the link in the show notes.
Jack Edwards:
And I'm going to be racing everyone to the checkout desk in this bookshop to get a copy of Hiroshima because I'm sold.
Rhianna Dhillon:
As regular listeners will know, there is a reason why we're called Ask Penguin. So every episode we put listener questions and book dilemmas to our guests. So I’m really hoping that because you guys all turned up today in person, that you are going to have and ask a book recommendation that you want or you have a question about something book or publishing related. So if you do, please put your hand up. We're putting you on the spot here. We've got a mic coming.
Audience:
Hi. I recently was looking for books that specifically relate to the body in a very particular way. I know there's lots of books that are described as being about the body or about, there's terms like body horror and things like that, but I was looking specifically for books related to being sort of the body as a landscape almost. And in my search I came across, It Lasts Forever and Then it's Over, which I really loved. I suppose just my question is are there any more books you'll have read like that? Just a question about that.
Jack Edwards:
An amazing question. I have two answers for you. Number one is in a more kind of like you said in a poetic way, the body as a landscape but used politically in J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace, the way that the body is described there as a sort of landscape for discussion about apartheid, but also bodily autonomy is phenomenal. So that's Disgrace. And then Elena Knows by Claudia Pinero on a more corporeal way about the body, it's about what happens when your body begins to fail you. And she's mourning the suicide of her daughter. She's trying to get to the bottom of things, but at the same time she is grappling with growing older and her body not doing what she is used to it being able to do. So that's a more corporeal kind of answer and then disgrace I would say on a more poetic abstract level.
Simon Prosser:
Yeah, I'd recommend, if you haven't read it, Greek Lessons by Han Kang. It's a book about touch. Partly it is a book about a man who is losing his sight and knows that very shortly he will have no sight. And a woman who is refusing speech for reasons you come to know, so is asking how can they connect? And she's a very poetic writer and bodies are a part of it and touch is very much a part of it and it's short and wonderful.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Great. Thank you. Any more questions or asks? Yes, we've got somebody.
Audience:
Hi. I'm also really excited to read Hiroshima after hearing you speak about it. I'm really curious to know if the Japanese people that were interviewed by the author were compensated for their time and telling their stories. Because it occurred to me whilst you were speaking that the Americans were the ones who inflicted this horrible thing on the Japanese people and it was an American man who then went and facilitated that storytelling. Is this a conversation that's taking place in the publishing industry now? How we tell these stories?
Simon Prosser:
Yes, the conversation certainly takes place in this specific case. I can't answer because I don't know the answer. I do know that James stayed in touch with those people. And although I haven't read it, he subsequently wrote something called The Aftermath where he went and talked to them again as to whether they received compensation from the New Yorker. I don't know. I would hope so. But yeah, we would be very alert to that now.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Thank you.
Jack Edwards:
It's a great question.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Very,
Simon Prosser:
It is a great question.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Do we have any more questions? Yes, we've got one there then we'll come to you at the back in a second. Hi.
Audience:
Hello.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Hey,
Audience:
I was wondering if you, given that we were talking about books that shock people, do you think that books that get a lot of mixed opinions or mixed reviews are more intriguing or have more merit in that case?
Simon Prosser:
Yes, I do. I think if you look up many demonstrably great literary novels, for example, to any kind of book selling search engine like thing, you'll see very mixed reviews. And so I don't think it's actually often the things that are a little more odine, less interesting that get full agreement. It's not always the case. So I think most people can agree Sally Rooney is pretty damn good, but in a lot of what's interesting that's out there, you will get very mixed reviews. So I think it's a good sign generally.
Jack Edwards:
I agree. I think almost all of my favourite books have a 3.75 average rating. If everyone rates it five stars, it's probably not going to be as interesting.
Audience:
I think we often think about classics or what makes a great book, as in how relevant it is throughout time. But I think another way of reading books is also by looking at their symbolism and aspects as an archetypal hero journey. And I was wondering whether you've noticed conversations that happens around this rather than how relevant the book is to nowadays? I
Simon Prosser:
Think it relates to what Jack was saying about these old stories like the Iliad story. People are certainly going back and seeing these stories as archetypal in some ways, but I love your idea that we should be looking at books more symbolically, almost like in a Jungian way, looking at that, which maybe is what you're getting at, which Lawrence D.H Lawrence is really interested in. And I don't know, it is not really part of our vocabulary at the moment, I don't think. Do you think looking at it that way, these archetypal myths?
Jack Edwards:
I think that the way to discover new methods of storytelling is to read books in translation, books that have been translated into English that were not written originally with a Western audience in mind. So I just read The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe, who's a Japanese writer, and it's basically all about a guy who is investigating insects on this beach and then gets stuck in this massive hole. And this woman is sort of keeping him hostage and it's a bit like Misery by Stephen King, but in a hole. Yeah, quite Kafkaesque. And there's sand everywhere. I read it because I thought it was a beach read. It was literally, it takes place on a beach, but it's not quite an Emily Henry Romance. Sort of the anti beach read. I also discovered the same is true for The Road by Cormac McCarthy, that’s a shocking book. It was harrowing. So yeah, I think that for me, one way that I've challenged myself since graduating from my literature degree where we read all English books that were designed for a Western audience was to go and read books from other countries. There's an amazing horror scene in Argentina and there are some mind-boggling character studies coming out of Japan and Korea. A great way to start is the International Booker Prize Shortlists, some really brilliant reads there and looking back through their archives is a really great place to start.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Any more questions in the room? Yes, one at the front.
Jack Edwards:
The mic is coming away. I might beatbox in the meantime. Oh no, it's there.
Speaker 9:
You were too late.
Jack Edwards:
I dunno how to beatbox. I was really hoping that she would walk quicker to you. It was a false promise. Sorry,
Audience:
This is quite a simple question, but seen as you were both so keen to recommend 1984, what would you say is a modern dystopian that you would recommend?
Jack Edwards:
You
Speaker 9:
You can say the Hunger Games, but I'd like to know why, if you are going to say the Hunger Games. Anything else that you would recommend?
Simon Prosser:
I have one. Ali Smith's book live. Ooh, check it out. It's really interesting because it's a dystopia where the actual mechanics of the dystopia don't really matter. What really matters to Ali is what we need as people, the spirit we need if this were to come to pass, how we're going to not just escape it, but well certainly escape it, but possibly stop it. Wonderful book.
Jack Edwards:
I don't have a better answer than that. And you did mention the Hunger Games already,
Rhianna Dhillon:
But you can say why you would recommend the Hunger Games.
Jack Edwards:
Well, I think that the Hunger Games is another example of a book that can be discredited because it caters also to a younger audience and is categorised as ya. But I think it stands the test of time. I think that it's another book that's entered our cultural lexicon and understanding to Uno reverse cardio. You can also go backwards and read the Dystopias that came before 1984. And while I think that 1984 was crucial in shaping the Western notion of dystopia, you can go back and read the book, which is basically what, 1984. It's kind of like the blueprint for 1984. And that's a really great Russian dystopia that started to pave the way for the dystopias all the way up to the Hunger Games and Cliff.
Simon Prosser:
I think what we need, by the way, are Utopias. So I think true, I really feel this and we've got to have something to aim for. It's not dystopian that we can fight for and get towards whatever that would be shocking looks like. But there's a shocking lack of utopias and infection. Always
Jack Edwards:
Thought of a good answer. Parable of the Sower. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler predicted the wildfires in LA in 2025, the location the year, it's crazy. But then when you really look into it, she wasn't some sort of mystic Meg predicting the future. She followed what she was seeing in the eighties to their logical conclusions. And that's what actually did happen. And I think the greatest anxiety that you have when reading that book is, is it too late? Because if she predicted it all that time ago, are we now too far gone is actually happening. So I think that the books of Octo Butler would be another place to go.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Thank you so much. I love that you were like, it's a simple question, but really brilliant answers,
Jack Edwards:
But we will spend in 10 minutes discussing.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I honestly have felt like I've been part of a book club this evening, which has been really lovely. And you mentioned your book club earlier, inklings. Tell us a bit about how you started it. What's going on with inklings?
Jack Edwards:
So inklings is my first born child. It's kind of like, I don't mean to be dramatic, but it does feel like what my whole career has sort of been leading up to kind of building an online community of people who all love reading to now all spend a month at a time lingering on one book. I know that book clubs have existed for many, many, many years, but I hope that this is one where we can really prioritise accessibility. It's only paperback books, so I hope they're cheaper to purchase. You might be able to find them in charity shops or secondhand. We are looking back through the history of literature, but also trying to interview lots of authors. And it's just a really lovely community of people based on Instagram, if you search inklings or on the Fable app, which is sort of a book club app.
And what I love about that is that you don't need to have finished the book to contribute to the discussion. You can join and there's a separate chat thread for each chapter. So wherever you are, you can communicate and join the discussion with people who are at the same point in the book as you. So we just finished reading evenings and weekends by Hin McKenna, a brilliant Irish debut novelist sort of love letter to London, a portrait of the city, state of the nation novel. And our pick for next month is the Coin by Yasmine Zaha, which is she's a Palestinian writer. And it's a book I think that demands to be read and it's a very, very special novel. So I'm very excited about it. So if that piques your interest, come and join.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you both so much for being here. It's been such a fascinating conversation. And also just like a real insight into the influence of Penguin over the last 90 years. So for anyone who has been inspired by the themes or books mentioned in this episode, there are links in the description box below to both the reading lists and the books recommended in this show. That's for the podcast listeners. Guys, there isn't a box below your chairs. Yeah, wait. Well this is not Oprah. If you are planning on visiting Waterstone's Piccadilly, then do visit. This is such a cool thing, the 90 Penguin years popup shop, where you'll find a treasure trove of incredible books as well as cabinets full of curiosities from Penguins archive. Thank you so much to our brilliant guest, Simon Proser and Jack Edwards, and to everyone here for your questions for listening, so brilliantly, attentively and at home who also have been sending in their questions, ask Penguin is going to be back in the autumn with more authors, books and reader requests for recommendations. And in the meantime, you can find so many more episodes on the podcast feed. And if you'd like to submit a question for a future episode, then follow us at penguin UK books or email the podcast at Penguin podcast@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk or follow us on broadcast channel on Instagram at penguin UK books. Thank you so much for listening and in the meantime, happy reading. Thank you. Thanks so much.