We asked notable Beijingers: "What's on your bookshelf?" Here's how Dr. Geoff Raby, the Australian ambassador to China, answered:

The book with the most sentimental value for me is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I realize how seriously this dates me! I was 21, making my first backpacking trip around Europe. I’d never heard of the Beat Generation and all the writers associated with it. News traveled slowly to Australia in those days!

But I was living the life: hitchhiking, sleeping rough, meeting amazing people, talking and drinking cheap grog late into the night. The freedom was more intoxicating than the grog. A young Canadian guy in Rome introduced the book to me and suddenly there was structure and context to what I was doing and living. I still enjoy Beat Generation lit.

I’d like to peek at the bookshelf of anyone at the center of the Chinese government. It might help me understand a little bit better how the political system in China works. And what could be a more unobtainable wish?

Is there a book that I pretend to have read? I note the question is singular. If it were plural, the list would be long indeed, but would always begin with Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.

A character in a book that I’d like to meet? Impossible to answer! For the sake of the exercise, though, any of the main characters from Paul Bowles' books (such as Sheltering Sky or Let it Come Down). They're all Bowles himself and I find his life to have been extraordinary. He was also a major literary figure of the second half of the last century. But then I'm probably just an ageing hippie at heart.

The last book I bought? This is embarrassing to answer truthfully, as the answer seems both so contrived and makes me sound so boring: Jay Taylor’s recent biography of Chiang Kai-shek.

Are there any books I would hide from visitors? Happily none. That's because to do so would offend my liberal sensibilities, but it could also be because I simply have no shame.

My bathroom reading? Depends precisely to which part of the bathroom the question refers. In one case, Chinese vocabulary books; in another place, easy-to-hold paperbacks that don’t mind getting wet.

The last book that I read is Margaret MacMillan's Peacemakers, which is about the 1919 Paris Peace Conference which led to the Treaty of Versailles. It contains an important story about China and the handing over to Japan of Germany's Chinese concessions after the First World War. MacMillan’s portraits of the individuals involved in the Conference, including Australia's Prime Minister at the time, Billy Hughes, are entertaining as well. Never before or since have such good intentions to set the world aright through international diplomacy led to such disastrous unintended consequences, and which were so widely foreseen at the time. The book had sat unread on my shelf for years, but with the recent Copenhagen Climate Change Conference the time had come to read it. Beijing's long cold winter this year helped as well.

Have I ever judged a book by its cover? Yes, but only until I read it.

My three all-time favorite books? Too hard!

Dr. Geoff Raby is the Australian Ambassador to China. He first came here in the early ’80s, and subsequently worked in the Australian Embassy in Beijing from 1986-1991. Stints in Canberra, Paris and Geneva followed before he returned to Beijing as ambassador in 2007. He is also the prime mover behind Australia’s Writers Week in China, which is running for its third time this March.

Dr. Raby will be speaking at The Bookworm International Literary Festival session "Australia in the Asian Literary Space" today (Tuesday, March 9) at 12.30pm. Also appearing on the panel will be publisher Ivor Indyk and NT Wordstorm festival director Sandra Thibodeaux. RMB 50.