The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis
So well written — Charles Highway is not likeable, and Amis's sentences are unfairly funny about that. I felt more parallels with my own thoughts as a teenager than I'm comfortable admitting. Selfis...
Book Reviews
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Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama
Such a clear diagnosis of where America is intellectually and how it got there — short enough to read in a couple of evenings without feeling shouted at. I was refreshed by his analysis of hyper-lib...
Adrift in the South by Xiao Hai
A stark reminder of how low the class ladder goes in China, and how privileged my daily life is by comparison. Xiao Hai spent years in southern factories — garments, electronics, the work most of my...
The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgenson
I thought I'd skim this and argue with it. I ended up reading most of it properly. Jorgenson lets Musk speak in his own words, and on rockets, batteries, and first-principles engineering he often sou...
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crazy book — I read it on the Shanghai metro and the murder scene is especially shocking. Clumsy, panicked, sickening; not cinematic at all. I had to put it down once. Raskolnikov talks himself into...
From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew
Lee Kuan Yew reads like a genius on the page — Singapore expelled from Malaysia, then the climb to absurd prosperity. I think his assessment of welfare systems is especially astute; parts of it sat u...
The Philosopher in the Valley by Michael Steinberger
Interesting book. Alex Karp is really not the typical Silicon Valley founder — philosophy PhD, dyslexic, tai chi, hotels and cross-country skiing instead of a campus hoodie. The ski bodyguards are t...
Breakneck by Dan Wang
I read much of this on the high-speed train to Beijing — cranes out the window the whole way. Dan Wang's contrast between an engineering-led China and a lawyer- or professional-politician-led West fe...
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo
Interesting to see Britain from an immigrant perspective — Z's diary in English that slowly improves, full of logical inconsistencies in the language and the culture that natives stop noticing. The ...
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson
A great merging of Buddhist calm and capitalist drive, at least on the page — wealth in one half, happiness treated as a skill in the other. I'm a Buddhist in the loose sense, so the second half felt...
Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard
Interesting to read this while I was still in Shanghai, where the book is set. Ballard grew up here and was interned as a boy not far from neighbourhoods I walked through after work. That overlap was...
The English Teacher's Companion by Jim Burke
Great book — I learnt a lot, especially in my first year when everything felt improvised and slightly terrifying. (My notes called it a handbook; the copy on my shelf is Burke's *Companion*.) No gra...
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
A great book about Buddhism, or at least about the search — Hesse was a German novelist, not a monk, and I don't treat it as doctrine. A friend lent it before I moved to China; I read it in short bur...
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
Gradgrind and "nothing but Facts" — the Industrial Revolution crushing imagination in Coketown's smoke and identical streets. Reading it in China, the parallels nagged at me: gaokao pressure, hardcor...
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
I read this in one sitting on a train — Santiago, the marlin, the sharks, the skeleton mistaken for a shark at the end. I enjoyed it, but the prose is so simplistic and repetitive that at points it ...
Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra Vogel
Deng is by far my favourite Chinese leader in the books I've read — pragmatic where Mao was ideologically lethal. Mao had obvious achievements; he also left awful scars on the health of Chinese socie...
Talk: The Science of Conversation by Elizabeth Stokoe
I caught myself rehearsing a parent meeting in the shower — not the facts, the turns. If she says this, I'll say that. Felt silly until Stokoe's book reminded me that preparing for conversation isn't...
The House that Jack Ma Built by Duncan Clark
Jack Ma is very impressive on the page — English teacher beginnings, failed exams, the Hangzhou flat where Alibaba started. Clark knew him early so it feels grounded rather than myth-making. What I ...
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
I enjoyed this — the Paris kitchen chapters are hot, exact, grimly funny; the hunger bit where he finally eats properly made me get up and make toast. Something troubled me underneath, though. There...
Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows
An interesting book — not a textbook, a memoir with a linguist's eye. I picked it up while my own Mandarin was in that slow middle phase where progress is hard to feel. It helped me understand the p...
River Town by Peter Hessler
I read this as an English teacher in China and got a lot out of it — probably more about teaching and about the country than from most books with "education" on the cover. Hessler's Peace Corps year...
The Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
A nice book, honestly — short, gentle, easy to read in a couple of sittings. Two city boys sent down during the Cultural Revolution, a hidden suitcase of banned Western novels, a local seamstress. Th...