A list of favorite books is de rigeur for any forgettable personal webpage. Why should I let this bright torch of a tradition extinguish on my page? Of course, the true point of this books page (at least for me) is not to tickle the fancy of the reader, but rather to give myself a broad expanse to boast, brag and otherwise flatter myself, so that I can coo, "Oh look how well read I am." Who would look for reading recommendations from a personal webpage anyway? Without further adieu...

To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf. Probably my favorite stream-of-conscience books (Portrait of an Artist bore me and I haven't gotten cracking on Ulysses yet). Everything from drinking a cup of tea to a daily conversation with family trembles with the unspoken tensions. The scene in Mrs. Dalloway when Peter and Vanessa meet again more than twenty years after she rejected his love was particularly jaw-droppingly brilliant. For fans of 1950s exsistential Swedish cinema, that whole theme of "men look for absolute truth while women look for interpersonal happiness" in Bergman's Wild Strawberries was patently ripped off from To the Lighthouse.

Candide - Voltaire. I normally hate anything French or anything from before the 19^th century. I make an exception for this book, though. When I think of literature this old, I think of lords prancing about in powdered wigs, having affairs with each other's wives. I didn't know that such dripping sarcasm and disdain for the Church existed back then.

Beloved - Toni Morrison. A staple on college students' reading lists, I read it a long while ago so I don't have too much to add about this book. However, I remember being disturbed by the scene in which the mother kills her baby, Beloved, so that she doesn't have to live as a slave. She uses a rusty sawblade, and I remember the way that Morrison describes the blood running through her fingers like oil.

Sandman - Neil Gaiman. Don't be fooled by the boxed illustrations and the word balloons: this is no ordinary comic series. This is serious literature. Overall, the Sandman series might be a little inconsistent, but there are very frequent flashes of storytelling brilliance. Gaiman's world is a mythological bouillabaisse, a universe ruled by the seven Endless, which represent abstract concepts (which also all begin with the letter D), like Dream, Desire, Desapir, etc. Besides, these Endless, all of the gods of all the world's religions and mythologies (Christian, Norse, Japanese, everything) happily coexist. My favorite story is "Seasons of Mist," when Lucifer (from Paradise Lost) decides to give up his reign of Hell to be a lounge piano player in Los Angeles, but first must decide to whom to give the key to Hell. Fascinating reading, but never too clever for its own good.

Lolita - Vladimir Nabakov. I’ll admit it. I initially picked up this book for the dirty parts. I ended up loving the book for non-prurient reasons. The narrator is absurdly overeducated, gleefully rips into the banality of American culture, and peppers his speech with numerous obscure French and German phrases. He becomes obsessed with a boring American pre-teenage girl, the antithesis of everything he values. Personally, I thought the plot sagged once all the erotic anticipation was gone, but the prose is ecstatic and wildly funny. Nabakov is one of the best writers in English that I've ever read and oh, wait, English is his second language. Indeed, English is more than his second language, it's his bitch.

"Neighbors" and "Cathedral" - Raymond Carver. These are two of my favorite stories from my favorite short story writer. His minimalist stories are similar to some of Kubrick's best cold, alienating movies. "Neighbors" is filled with a perverse sexual energy, a cold room charged with static electricity. "Cathedral" is an awakening, a learning of a new way of seeing.

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon. This thin book, set in 1970’s Southern California, involves Jacobean revenge plays, an underground mail system, and an extensive discussion of thermodynamics (among other things). Normally, a post-modern set-up like this would feel like some sort of writing exercise, but Pynchon avoids falling into this trap through his peculiar writing style, which is in turns paranoid, ecstatic, somber, and hysterically funny.

The Picture of Dorian Grey - Oscar Wilde. I remember reading in the intro how this novel scandalized Victorian society and how he had to add several chapters to mitigate it. So of course, I went into the book expecting scandal to be all about pre-marital sex or some other similar behavior that's far from offensive nowadays. As it turns out, I was thoroughly scandalized myself. It's about a gay man who makes love with all these other noblemen in between the lines. When he has his portrait painted, because of some forgettable sort of plot device, this causes him to not age. He becomes increasingly vainglorious and brazen with his affairs with other noblemen. He then murders the portrait painter and gets away with it. Despite its potentially corrupting effects on Victorian youth, you have to love Wilde's one-liners.

Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier. Imagine Hemmingway if he hadn't written about drunk, rich fucks, but instead wrote a Civil War-era love story (A Farewell to Arms is not a love story). Also, Frazier knows a hell lot about the ecology of North Carolina.

The Soul of Black Folks - W.E.B. Dubois (that's pronounced doo-boys, not doo-bwah). One of the most brilliant sociological book written in the 20th century. He predicted (correctly) that race would continue to be the defining issue for the 20th century. His idea regarding "double consciousness" (he felt that at that time, blacks were neither truly American nor African) is still relevant today. While widely recognized today as one of the most important books ever on racial relations, it was mostly ignored at the time. The editorial board of the New York Times was too busy sucking up to that Uncle Tom, Booker T. Washington. This book was even being ignored by white liberals, who back then couldn't be bothered with thinking things like enforcing the 15th Amendment.

"Kong Yiji" - Lu Xun. The best short story by the most influential Chinese writer of the twentieth century. The defining image of the May Fourth Movement is that of Kong Yiji, a failed scholar routinely humiliated by the townspeople, dragging himself with his hands through the mud to a bar because his legs were broken by a landlord who caught him stealing. A witness to all these events, the narrator speaks in a facade of terse words and an emotionless tone, yet through the cracks you can feel him aching with feelings of regret.

"Spring Silkworms" - Mao Dun. A bone-crushing story in the socialist realist tradition of poverty and despair in a silkworm farming village. Again, this another one of the classics.

The Sorrow of War - Bao Ninh. A book about the Vietnam War written from the Viet Cong side. Interestingly, it’s much more critical of the Ho Chi Minh government than of the America’s actions. On the surface, it would resemble Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five for its jumpy style and hollowed out protagonist, but the ending gathers the emotional force of an avalanche as the different strands of the narrative come together. In the end, Sorrow turns out to be a much more powerful book than any of the written diarrhea that came out of Vonnegut.

Playing for Thirlls - Wang Shuo. Completely tripped out novel about a man on the run from the police for a murder that might or might not have occurred ten years ago and that might or might not have been committed by the narrator. As the book goes on, the narrator himself becomes progressively more unsure of whether or not he committed the murder and the other characters become progressively more unsure of who exactly the narrator is. Towards the end, it does sag a bit from all the weight of the uncertainty. Nonetheless, it's filled with plenty of snappy dialogue of hooligans (liumang) bragging about how many women they've bagged and how those annoyingly idealistic pro-democracy students can go shove it.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami. Another trippy, post-modern novel full of stories within stories and stories parallel to other stories. The narration form morphs from standard narration into a choppy mishmash of written letters, newspaper articles, and Internet chat transcripts. The narrator, a Japanese man in his mid-30's, is the exact opposite of the typical salaryman: he's unemployed, sits around in dirty tennis shoes and T-shirts, and listens to Rossini while he cooks spaghetti. He is searching for his wife who mysteriously disappeared. This is somehow related to a psychic whose grandfather was a zookeeper in WWII-era Manchuria and some evil Russian soldier who specializes in skinning people alive. The story stays interesting because of all the quirky characters, disturbing imagery, and plenty of suspense even though it's sometimes utterly perplexing to figure what's happening.

A Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A staple on any college student's favorite book list, this book did nothing for me. Some of the magic realist scenes were inspired, some were not (like when one of the characters started to grow a tail.) Nor could I connect with any of the endless stream of Jose Aurelio's that come and go. Not a particularly offensive book, but I still think it is undeserving of the raves many people ravish upon it.

Underworld - Don DeLillo. This book suffers from the worst aspects of post-modern stories (namely, an autofellative narcissism) without any of its good aspects (any sort of witty irreverence). Underworld is compulsively obsessed and in love with its own structure. "Look at me! I'm over 800 pages long! I go from Phoenix to Kahzakstan. I'm told chronologically backwards! Aren't I special?" DeLillo often inserts some object in one scene (e.g. orange juice or a picture of Jane Mansfield) just to have it deliberately pop up in the next scene, which takes place five years before. Isn't that clever? The structure is impressive, but it doesn't make up for the forced writing style or forgettable characters. Nominally the plot is about some guy who might have committed a murder in the past. I guess. DeLillo seems as apathetic to the plot as I was. The much-praised opening scene, describing Bobby Thompson's famous "Shot Heard 'Round the World" and featuring J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason, and Frank Sinatra, among other people, chatting in the stands was an overly conscious attempt at being "writterly." Its solemnity was laughable. "Look at me! I'm talking about Race and Culture in Cold War America! Am I not a Great American Novel?" Underworld, you're no Moby Dick. You're not even a Moderately Interesting American Novel.

The Rape of Nanking - Iris Chang. It goes without saying that in the Pacific theatre of WWII, both the Japanese and Americans committed despicable atrocities. I’m frustrated that the Holocaust is so well-known while few people know about the Japanese' systematic medical experimentation on POWs and raping of tens of thousands of Korean and Chinese "comfort women." The severity of what the Japanese did is separated from the evils of Nazi Germany only by an order of magnitude or two. The Americans were hardly saints either: besides the mobilization of Japanese-Americans into concentration camps, the nuclear bombing of two civilian cities on the eve of the Japanese surrender was entirely unjustified. (If you think that the nuclear bombings were necessary to forestall an invasion of Japan, I highly recommend Gar Alperovitz's The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb to dispel your delusions). Nonetheless, I admit my bias against the Japanese side in interpreting the events of WWII. Reading or watching depictions of the Rape of Nanjing (The HK-produced movie "Nanking 1941" was a particularly engrossing dramatization) viscerally disgust and anger me.

All of that being said, I find it a terrible shame that this amateurishly written, poorly researched book has become the definitive word on the subject. Chang's description of some of the gruesome details of the Rape of Nanjing were riveting, like how groups of Japanese generals would go around having contests seeing who could decapitate the most civilians, the use of POWs as live bayonet practice, the sheer number of rapes, etc. Nonetheless she clearly lacks a full understanding of the broader historical or cultural background underlying this 'incident.' Chang would have benefited from taking an intro level class on modern Asian history at a local community college before starting to write this book. For a more nuanced take on early 20th century Japanese history, you would do better to ignore her one paragraph summary and look it up in Grolier's encyclopedia. While she was not aiming to write a dense footnote-laden tome for an academic audience, the popular audience nonetheless deserves more than context than the pitiful scraps that she offers.

Her coverage of the Japanese denial is only marginally better. Indeed, the erasing of historical memory in the 20th century by both the Japanese and Chinese (ahem... June 4, 1989) is another tragedy in itself. It is frustrating to see all the effort being put into preserving the memory of the Holocaust, while Japan publishes history textbooks that don't mention 'comfort women.' Still, her insistence on calling the Japanese government's head-in-the sand denial that these events ever took place as "the second rape of Nanjing" is utterly maudlin. It is more fitting of a Lifetime movie than a history book.

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