This is one of my bookshelves. From left to right: Family by Pa Chin and Story of the Stone, Vol 1 by Cao Xueqin, both bought my senior year at Caltech for Dr Lee's H 136 class, "Family, Friendship, and Love in Chinese Culture." Julie brought me The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte when she joined Shirley and me in Hong Kong for our 2002 Chinese New Year trip. Next to it is the Lonely Planet China that I bought when I went to China for the first time in 2000 with the Princeton in Beijing program. The Let's Go China is Julie's, which she left with us when she went back to the US. I still haven't returned it. The book that follows is Fingertip Chinese, one of the best Chinese phrasebooks I've found besides the annually revised Princeton in Beijing phrasebook. The black book is a collection of ancient Chinese stories written in triplicate: once in Classical Chinese, once in modern Chinese and once in English. It is called Classical Chinese: Present Day Chinese & English Renditions and published by Sinolingua. Next is Selected Readings in American Literature, published by Nankai University, which I bought while living in Tianjin and starving for English books. Following the literature anthology are two volumes of Canfonian Pte Ltd's Pictoral Stories of Chinese Classics, numbers four and five of the Water Margin series. They are basically comic books with both Chinese and English captions. They were purchased at the Wangfujing Xinhua Bookstore. Alongside these are cheap paperback versions of the Water Margin, in Chinese. Beginning my modern book collection and also in Chinese is the version of Lord of the Rings that Shirley bought in Taiwan. Next is one in a series of biographies of great historical figures. There were biographies of great Chinese philosophers including Confucius and Mencius, and great men of the Western world including Newton and Lincoln. Naturally, I chose the most relevant one in the series: the biography of Bill Gates. I kid you not. The next book is called Meiguo 911. I bought it outside the eastern gate of Nankai University at the so-called New Culture Street market a few days after September 11, 2001. It has color pictures and articles about Bush, Osama bin Laden and New York. Next in my modern books are the political books. Since my reading level is not high, I chose simple books for elementary school kids. First, Wo ai Zhonguo Gongchandang or I love the Chinese Communist Party. Also, Zhonguo youle Gongchandang or China has a Communist Party, a longer history of modern China and its political party. My education books include Yuwen Shijian or Language Practice, a first grade language book published by the Tianjin Educational Research department. I picked it up at the CRIS Elementary School in Tianjin. Daoxueshi Jiaoxuefa or Instructional Style Teaching Methods compiled by the principal of Zhongying Elementary School, a model school in Tianjin. I visited Zhongying Elementary as part of a tour of schools in the city when I accompanied Dr Donald Douglas on his visit. Many of my books are outside perspectives on China. First is Jonathan Spence's The Chan's Great Continent, a book I read at CRIS and subsequently purchased for my own collection at a FNAC in Taiwan. It "explores how missionaries, travellers, poets, writers, diplomats and other outsiders have viewed China over seven centuries". Next is the bichromatic spine of the Tiananmen Papers, edited by Andrew Nathan, purchased at the Glorietta Mall in Makati, the Philippines, and "smuggled" into China through Hong Kong. Professor Chen Jian analyzes Mao's China in Mao's China and the Cold War. I got a signed copy of former New York Times Beijing bureau chief, now editorial columnist Nicholas Kristof and wife Sheryl Wudunn's China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power. I was introduced to this book by Calvin student Josh Gilliland in the summer of 2000, as a textbook for their Calvin program at the Beijing Institute of Technology. Next is an old issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, an anthology of Chinese literature published by the China International Book Trading Corporation in "Autumn 1984". At a bookstore in Ximending, in Taipei, I picked up Bound Feet: Stories of Contemporary Taiwan by Catherine Dai. For practicing Chinese, I have several books. First, Yuwen Ciyu Shouce or Language Words Handbook, a workbook for learning new words from characters. Also, several books with model characters and spaces to copy them. This should help you to improve your handwriting. Finally, books that are obscured by the right-end stack include the second-year Princeton in Beijing textbooks, a Nankai University textbook for Chinese learners, The World of Suzie Wong from a Hong Kong Bookazine, several Asterix comic books, a copy of Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami "purchased" from the Fullerton Library while presumed lost, the Lonely Planet Korean Phrasebook which I used to learn reading Korean the summer I worked at Knott's Berry Farm, and a four language phrasebook of Tagalog, Korean, Japanese and English phrases.