Being a fan of Anchee Min, I think her books are very enjoyable. Empress Orchid’s life begins like Cinderella but don’t expect a happy fairytale ending. This book is fascinating because of the hardship the main character went through in becoming one of Emperor’s concubines. The story background is also interesting and exciting because it shows the life inside a royal court.

People from all of the world are visiting Beijing nowadays, if you are one of them, have you ever thought about visiting a village of Beijing? In recent years, more and more of the Beijing citizens spend holidays in village, to experience more traditional ways of celebrating holiday. Such as joining the villagers in hanging red lanterns, crafting decorative paper-cuts, walking on stilts, and releasing prayer lanterns to the river currents - reminders me of my childhood. I was born and grow up in a small village, and villagers always give me the feeling of warm and welcome. So, escape the fast pace of modern urban life, and go experience the beautiful natural landscapes, cozy farmers' houses, and flavorful rural dishes!

So, this is the book that finally overtook the sales of Harry Potter where it too was the bestselling title in China. A modern reinterpretation of good old Confucius' teachings from more than 2500 years ago. As I have said before, most of what Confucius taught was nothing overly academic, but very approachable basic humanistic principles. But over the years, his teachings do fall out of fashion from time to time. What Yu Dan has done with this book is she has successfully refreshed Confucius' teachings and more importantly, make them relevant to today's people who feel they are lost in a crazy world that is changing too fast and overly materialistic. Surely the lessons apply to us Americans too. The gloomy economy is getting you down? It's time for a heart-to-heart with Confucius.

This was the book used in the Chinese University of Hong Kong for a Mandarin Presentation class. The vocabulary in this book is not particularly difficult for a college level course, but it had many relevant topics to bounce off of for creating an interesting speech. This book includes a wild range of topics, including current condition of an industrial China to criticism on the Chinese education system. Speaking Chinese about China is a great tool to use for creating Chinese presentations while learning about the modern cultural aspects of China.

If you’re going to China, but can’t speak Chinese, this phrasebook is an absolute must! Not only is this book a perfect size, it is easy to follow. I don’t want to sound like a shameless commercial, but seriously, I’ve seen many phrasebooks before and find this one the most navigateable.

Benjamin’s “Remember” explodes the stereotype of the “Me Generation” being a mass of vapid, bubblegum popping, digital-media slurping, trend whores; he imposes a range of grey shadows over what has previously only been represented as flat cartoon colors. The stories in “Remember” – Nobody will Fly, Nobody will Remember and That Summer – are wrenching dark journeys through the underside of China’s prosperity. The protagonists are the impoverished geeks from the countryside trying to test into art school while being hazed by wealthy, “cool” city kids, girls that suddenly lose their minds, twenty somethings that live in hovels to support their art. They are powerful, narcissistic and beautifully illustrated. Whatever your age, you will come away from this book with a sense of the sweaty, gritty reality of urban youth in China today.

The characters in Ma Jian’s The Noodle Maker remind me of the madmen, beggars and servants in Lu Xun’s short stories – they are wry and clueless. Although The Noodle Maker is told through the sober eyes of a propaganda writer, the book follows characters like an actress who stages a public suicide, a painter who engages a three-legged dog in philosophical conversations and a young woman who gives up her job after being accused of sleeping around. Set in the 1970s when China first opened its’ doors to foreign trade, there are lessons to be learned from these stories: mostly that public policy affects private lives. With plenty of ludicrous characters at his disposal, Ma Jian’s funny, but biting satire spares almost no one.

Forget Alaska. This is "into the wild", a five year quest undertaken not by a callow college grad but by acclaimed explorer, world-class climber and Buddhist scholar Ian Baker to find a fabled waterfall at the heart of the deepest gorge on earth (three times the Grand Canyon) in the Tibetan hinterland. Previous explorers, including the Royal Geographical Society, dismissed the search for the falls as "the most obsessive wild goose chase of modern times". Baker never gave up however, even after a series of harrowing expeditions, all recounted beautifully in this journey to one of the wildest, most inaccessible and mythical places on earth: the Tsangpo Gorge AND the human soul. So riveting that even sitting in an armchair might require a safety strap. Will NOT be a major motion picture anytime soon.