Given the profusion of both print and digital media available on any given topic, it is sometimes difficult to determine the best sources for information that is at once thorough, accurate, and easily digested. For this reason, we have contacted a number of academics, celebrities, and other authorities on the history, economy, government, literature, and popular culture of China in order to offer you a list of books that offer a complex and multifaceted view of the country. Each of these books has been selected for both its informational breadth and quality and its accessibility to a general audience, so whether you watch CCTV religiously and eat xiao long bao for breakfast every morning or have no idea where Beijing is, you should find something of interest in all of them.

These books will be donated to each of the schools to be visited on the IMUSE 2008 North American campus tour for display before and during that institution's conference.

Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, New York: Harper Perennial, 2002

Winner of the 2001 Kiriamas Award for nonfiction and a New York Times Notable Book for 2001.

“Beautifully crafted …. A soulful act of literary reportage and a classical tale of the American abroad.” —Wall Street Journal

“A wonderful portrait of contemporary China …. [It] brings the people alive, in all their diversity. —Time

“Studded with insight and humility, written with unshowy elegance River Town is about ways of seeing.” —Daily Telegraph

James Kynge, China Shakes the World: A Titan's Rise and Troubled Future -- and the Challenge for America, New York: Mariner Books, 2007

Best Book of the Year by the Economist, winner of the Financial Time/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and finalist for the Gerald Loeb Business Book Award.

“A nuanced and superbly reported read about chain and the West.” —New York Times

“An excellent book …. Balanced and very readable.” —Chris Pattern, former governor of Hong Kong

“James Kynge ..uncovers the fallout, both at home and abroad, of China’s dramatic rise. A convincing work of reportage and analysis.” —Ian Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Wild grass: Three Tales of Changes in Modern China

National Geographic, National Geographic Atlas of China, National Geographic, 2007

A new atlas with more than 300 full-color maps and illustrations, highlighting the tremendous changes occurring within China and their implications.

Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China

“A remarkable achievement...vivid...fluent, graceful.... A publishing event.” —Boston Globe

“Monumental.... History that is always lively, always concrete, always comprehensible.” —New York Times

“History at its best...all in the vivid, accessible style for which the author is well known.” —Washington Post Book World

Yutang Lin, The Importance of Living, New York: William Morrow & Co., 1998

Harvard scholar, Taoist, and modernist Lin Yutang expounds on classic Chinese philosophy of life

“A richly, enjoyably wise and suggestive book.” —The New York Times

“Dr. Lin has performed the inestimable service of distilling the philosophy of generations of Chinese sages and presenting it against a modern … background which makes it easily readable and understandable.” —The Saturday Review of Literature

Hua Yu, To Live, Anchor Publishing, 2003

Internationally acclaimed Chinese bestseller and winner of James Joyce Foundation Award

“A work of astounding emotional power.” —Dai Sijie, author of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“Yu Hua is the most profound voice coming out of China today. To Live reaches not only into the very essence of China and the Chinese people but into the blood and bones core of what it means to be a human being.” —Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain

Shaogong Han, A Dictionary of Maqiao, Translated by Julia Lovell, Dial Press Trade Paperback (September 27, 2005)

“The best novel of the year.” —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

Ray Huang, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline, Yale University Press (September 10, 1982)

“Huang shows a mastery of the intricate details of the ritualistic and practical sides of Ming court politics, and an ability to make them comprehensible. His story is cleverly constructed and deliberately paradoxical. If 1587 is, in the long run, a 'year of no significance,' it is nevertheless full of incident, and each incident carries promise of future drama.” —Jonathan Spence, New York Review of Books

“1587, A Year of No Significance, for all its scholarship, has the surreal visionary quality of Kafka's beautiful and frustrating story 'The Great Wall of China.'” —John Updike, New Yorker