Episode Details

这期节目主播和Richard介绍我们是如何为一个面积很有限的小书店选书的。这期节目依然适用慢速、简单英文录制，下面是我们的录音稿文字，是通过 otter.ai 整理，希望对大家有所帮助。

Yifan 

Did you listen to the last episode, your first podcast? 

Richard 

Once I could bet to hear myself recorded?

Yifan 

How many times?

Richard 

Once? All right, did you show this to your parents? Nope. Your girlfriend? Nobody? I don't think, Oh, actually, no, my girlfriend sent the culture potato podcast link to one of her friends. Just to tell him about, oh, we're doing this bookshop and I'm doing you know, we're doing this bookshop together. And this is a guy who's like, an I was obsessed, well obsessed with all sorts of things. But when she knew him, when the window in the living together, he was obsessed with learning Mandarin. So she said, Oh, here's a podcast for you. It's Richard's friends podcast. And then she probably said the list and maybe further down he saw, you might have seen because you did two more episodes to three more episodes since. So he might have noticed that one. Okay, I don't know if he went there.

Yifan 

Okay, so this week, we want to talk about our book choices, you know, as a bookshop, how we choose books. But before we get into all that, can you talk about perhaps the most memorable book you read in 2020? Well,

the book I've chosen for this is probably it will be crashed by Adam Tooze, which is a book about the financial crisis of 2008. And it actually came out in 2018, as a 10 year anniversary, but I finally read it during lockdown. He's a professor of financial history. So there's a lot of data, a lot of material, yet it reads like a thriller.

So it's heading to a Netflix.

Yeah, it could, it could head to Netflix. But I'm thinking it also, didn't you read? too big to fail? Yes, I did. When it came out, and maybe it's like that as well. Although, because then that isn't that supposed to be super readable and reads like a thriller and so forth? and Netflix material, potentially?

Yeah. Is that that's even HBO material? I would say.

Yeah. So yeah, that probably finally getting around to reading that, from one year from one economic crisis to a health crisis.

And what is the conclusion? Has anything changed? In the 10 years? Since?

I'm not sure, really, there's a bit of optimism, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Okay. But personally, in the last 10 years, you know, one of the big actors in the 2008 financial crisis is Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan. And over the last 10 odd years, I have seen a big transformation in his attitude and to a certain extent, reputation. He has embraced at least superficially. A lot of the new ideas that's that was fermenting in the business world. Yeah. The moving away from maximising shareholder value to to more of a socialist outlook, to the extent that it is possible that, you know, the care for society for employees. I don't know, does the book talk about this?

Richard 

No, no, no, no, not not really less of a thing.

Yifan 

So even if England is still in full lockdown mode, however, in the background, we are busying you know, compiling lists of books who are going to order and to to fill our shelves. So as the general manager, Richard, can you talk about how you are approaching this, how we are picking our books and how we are presenting it to them to our customers?

Richard 

Sure, looking at the fact that we're somewhat constricted by space, and we obviously can't stock every single book that's out there and buy every single genre, like you would in a big bookshop with obviously selecting what we like, but also books that people think are relevant, whether they're classic works of literature, or authoritative works of nonfiction. And some of these recommendations, we're also taking from what we've read in reviews or whether it's from people discussing books in sci