Below are some books I’ve read or will read, as well as my comments on them. This list does not include books I started but didn’t finish.
Finished
- “A Truthful Impression of the Country”: British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880–1949 (Nicholas R. Clifford)
- 2009/7/27 Saw this in the footnotes of MacMillan’s Nixon and Mao and got it from Green Library. I was expecting it to be an anthology of primary source travel writing, not an essay with a few interspersed quotations here and there. Still, it was a good read and gave me pointers to primary sources I’d enjoy reading.
- On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
- 2009/7/18 Kept me turning pages. Not quite sure what to think yet. While reading I alternated between wanting to up and go and thinking they were crazy.
- Jermaine Magnuson’s China Diary (Jermaine Magnuson)
- 2009/6/29 A US Senator’s wife’s 44-page account of a 1974 Congressional trip to China. She definitely drank the Kool-Aid, although the journal’s primary audience was probably the Chinese government.
- Timothy Leary: A Biography (Robert Greenfield)
- 2009/6/29 Could not put down this 600-page book after I started reading it; a fascinating (and quite negative) bio of Leary, and an interesting look at the 60s counterculture movement. Lots of cool anecdotes about his meetings with other famous people, too.
- Google’s PageRank and Beyond (Amy N. Langville, Carl D. Meyer)
- 2009/1 Despite the non-technical-sounding name, this was a great introduction to PageRank and other link ranking algorithms, covering the basics, convergence, improvements to the original algorithms, etc.
- A Course on the Web Graph (Anthony Bonato)
- 2009/1 A more graph-theoretical, slightly less accessible introduction to link ranking algorithms than the book above.
- Nixon and Mao (Margaret MacMillan)
- 2009/3 Fascinating; a quick read that kept my attention. Lots of historical tidbits, and funny at times.
- Oracle Bones (Peter Hessler)
- 2009/3 Great China travelogue. I skipped most of the chapters about the oracle bones (is that wrong?) but enjoyed the other half about the people he met.
- Foreign Babes in Beijing (Rachel DeWoskin)
- 2008/5 Absolutely hilarious, captivating. I haven’t been able to find the full video of the CCTV series by the same name, unfortunately.
- Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
- 2008/2
- Mandarin Phrasebook (True Run Media; Adam Pillsbury, Editor)
- 2008/7 This is by far the best Mandarin phrasebook. Plus, what other phrasebook has a sidebar with “10 sentences to get away from Great Wall postcard/book guy”? Example: 别靠近我，我有禽流感！ (Translation: Stay away from me. I have bird flu!)
- Insider’s Guide to Beijing 2008 (True Run Media; Adam Pillsbury, Editor)
- 2008/7 By the same people who made the phrasebook above, this is the best Beijing guidebook. It’s also an enjoyable cover-to-cover read for anyone who’s spent time in Beijing. My favorite unusual place it lists: the Beijing Hotel Equipment Corporation. (I’ll probably write more about the HEC later.)
Currently reading
- Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company (Michael S. Malone)
- Lots of interesting Stanford history. Reads like HP propaganda in certain points.
- A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
Will start reading soon
- The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Alice Schroeder)
- A People’s History of the United States (Howard Zinn)
- Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics (William Dunham)
Will start reading later
- China in Old Photographs, 1860-1910 (Burton F. Beers)
- 1978 photo book.
- China: All Provinces and Autonomous Regions (Jugoslovenska Revija; Shanghai People’s Art Publishing House)
- 1980 photo book.
- China as She Is: A Comprehensive Album (L. T. Wu, et al.)
- 1934 photo book. Apparently this is very rare!
- An American in China (Jan C. Ting)
- 1972 China travelogue.
- Living with the Communists: China 1953–5, Soviet Union 1962–5 (Humphrey Trevelyan)
- Why We Buy (Paco Underhill)
- China Journey (Chester Fritz)
- Travel Guide to the People’s Republic of China (Ruth Lor Malloy)
- From peeking at a few pages of this book, it seems that getting Chinese visas has always been difficult.
- To China and Back (Albert Smith)
- 1859 China travelogue.
- Notes from China (Barbara Tuchman)
- Dateline-Peking (Frederick Nossal)
- An American in China 1936-1939 (Gould H. Thomas)
- In the People’s Republic: An American’s first-hand view of living and working in China (Orville Schell)
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Dave Eggers)
- The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing (Anne-Marie Broudehoux)
- From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Fred Turner)
- Into the Wild (Jon Krakauer)
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert M. Pirsig)