No, these aren't quite beach reads, but neither are they 500-page tomes by Dickens or Hardy you had to read during your high school summers.
For anyone thinking about visiting or moving to China, it doesn't hurt to read up on the country via literary non-fiction. Some of my reads from the past year:
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, by Peter Hessler (2001) Peace Corps volunteer Peter Hessler spent two years in Fuling in Sichuan Provice teaching English. His account of his experience is more observant, introspective, and humble than almost anything you're likely to encounter.
Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present, by Peter Hessler (2006) After teaching in Sichuan, Hessler moves to Beijing and becomes a freelance correspondent for a number of US publications. He interweaves a story of oracle bones excavated in Anyang province with the lives of 2 former students and a Uighur money trader, all migrants who are, in their own way, searching for better lives against China's rapidly changing climate.
Red Dust: A Path Through China, by Ma Jian (2001) A brilliant travelogue by a dissident Beijing artist, who flees Beijing in the 1980s and spends three years traveling through some of China's sparsest and poverty-stricken regions, including the forests of Yunnan, the dessert plateaus of Tibet, and the Yellow River in Inner Mongolia.
The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time, by Simon Winchester (1996) Simon Winchester, a historian from England, travels 3,434 miles up the Yangtze, reflecting on the historical and present day importance of the river in the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese.
Riding the Iron Rooster, by Paul Theroux (1988) The peripatetic curmudgeon travels across China by train in the mid-1980s. He questions many Chinese along the way about the Cultural Revolution, paving the way for many haughty journalists of the 21st century, who believe they have to right to question every Chinese they meet about population and derechos humanos.
