Favorites in Academic and Other Print Media...

(IF I HADN'T SPENT SO MUCH TIME LEARNING SPANISH AND CHINESE, MAYBE I'D BE MORE LITERATE, BUT I WOULDN'T TRADE THE SKILLZ!)

ACADEMIC BOOKS I LIKE (Can't recommend these to a general readership, but I learned a lot from these and cite them frequently.)

A Nation-State by Construction, The Great Divergence, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu & the West,

ACADEMIC OR NON-FICTION BOOKS & ARTICLES I CAN RECOMMEND TO NON-SCHOLARS (These are at least slightly more accessible.)

American Savage, Bowling Alone, Coming to Terms with the Nation, Sex at Dawn,

SCHOLARS WHOSE WORK I ADMIRE GENERALLY (This list should grow with time! And of course I have the utmost respect for the faculty of Oberlin, Marquette U & UCI' s political science and history depts. For now it's mostly China scholars.)

Allen Carlson, Bruce Cumings, Arif Dirlik, Jean-Francois Dupre, Jack Goldstone, David Kang, Amy H. Liu, Nicholas Onuf, Elizabeth Perry, David Shambaugh, Doh Chul Shin, Sebastian Veg, Suisheng Zhao, Yuezhi Zhao

FICTION/NOVELS I HAVE READ AND ENJOYED (No bragging here. I just forget what I've read all the time. Leaving most of the books Grandma sent to me in PC China doesn't help. I blame tv and video games as a youth for this list not being much, much longer. Oh yeah, and grad school! A person who doesn't wish s/he was better read is no one I want to meet. Titles arranged by title with attempt to clump titles by the same authors, as I'm not a good enough reader to be able to say I like a particular author.)

Bel Canto, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Crime & Punishment, High Fidelity, Lullabye, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Trainspotting, Marabou Stork Nightmares, War & Peace, Cat's Cradle, Player Piano,

JOURNALISTS AND OTHER WRITERS WHOSE WORK I SEEK OUT (Rabble-rousers and muckrakers dominate here. Sometimes it just feels good to agree with someone.)

Gustavo Arellano, Peter Hessler, Bertil Lintner, Liz Pelly, Matt Taibbi,

COLUMNISTS WRITING INTERESTING/PROVOCATIVE/CONSERVATIVE PIECES WITH WHICH I CAN RESPECTFULLY DISAGREE (We should all strive to break through our respective echo chambers. There are also plenty of writers I read but can scarcely tolerate or respect at all.)

David Brooks, "Never Trump" Republicans generally, George Will

MAGAZINES AND NEWSPAPERS I'D SUBSCRIBE TO IF I HAD MORE MONEY (Some of these my family or I actually did subscribe to for a while. In ten years no one under 30 will understand what it meant to receive a printed thing in the mail every week/month.)

Adbusters, The Atlantic, Harper's, Mother Jones, The Nation, Rolling Stone, Science News, Spin, Z Magazine

BOOKS I KNOW I NEED TO READ (See also my wishlist on Half)

Retreat of the Elephants, Mao's War on Nature

I JUST COULDN'T GET THROUGH (These were non-page-turners I COULD and did put down. Hooray for giving up sometimes!)

A Brief History of Time, The Glass Bead Game

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