We asked notable Beijingers: "What's on your bookshelf?" Here's what Ian Johnson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Beijing correspondent for the Wall Street Journal said:

My favorite childhood book is House at Pooh Corner.

The book that has the most sentimental value for me is the translation of A Dream of Red Mansions. I remember reading that when I was first studying Chinese and just thinking “This is just really great literature.” It really stuck with me, I liked it a lot. It’s a pity, because my Chinese will never be good enough to read it in Chinese. [For the translation] get the Penguin one, don’t get the ones published by the Foreign Languages Press.

The books I would hide from visitors are my bound copies of China Daily.

A bookshelf I’d like a peek at is the Marquis de Sade’s.

A Beijing bookshelf I’d like a peek at is my ayi’s.

A book that I pretend to have read is The Water Margin.

One “must-read” China book is Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang. The media constantly talks about the bad side of China, the dark side. We tend to overexpose the corruption, the environmental problems. People come to China and they are often perplexed. They’re like, “Well, this country doesn’t feel like a totalitarian dictatorship run by a bunch of maniacs.” I think Factory Girls is nice because it’s not a positive whitewash, but it does show the upward mobility of Chinese people. People who start as peasants and then they work in factories, and I think even one of them becomes a white-collar worker in the end – I mean that’s extreme but I think it does show the overall trajectory of what’s been happening the past 30 years. Everyone knows China is the world’s factory, but [in this book] for the first time that I know of, you actually meet some factory workers. She gives them a sense of empowerment and agency. They’re not victims.

My three all-time favorite books? Night by Elie Wiesel. The Epic of Gilgamesh. And Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies: Dogbert's Big Book of Business by Scott Adams.

My bathroom reading is The New Yorker. I spend a long time in there.

A book that changed my life is Chinese Shadows by Simon Leys

A fictional character I’d like to meet is Xue Baochai [from A Dream of Red Mansions].

What am I reading now? Mark Elvin’s The Pattern of the Chinese Past, an old favorite of mine. Elvin is an older Sinologist – this kind of book, with such a broad topic, academics and Sinologists never write anymore. It’s an effort to say (and the whole question is almost impossible) what happened to China that it fell behind the West? Why did it not make the technological leap? Why was there no industrial revolution in China? Elvin posits this idea that China reached what he calls “high-level equilibrium” – in other words, because of surplus labor there was no need for technological advances. China was then at a very high level much earlier than the West, but didn’t break beyond that. It’s very stimulating, a lot of fun to read.

Alain Peyrefitte’s The Collision of Two Civilizations: Immobile Empire, which is all about [Lord Macartney’s] expedition to China, where he meets the emperor and will only put one knee down in from of him, and about how they traveled upward, what they saw. It’s got pictures.

Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping. I’m going through the catalog of this exhibition of Luo Ping, who was one of the eccentrics of Yangzhou; it was on at the Met last autumn. This is the kind of thing that I really miss in China: exhibitions at museums where they’ll make you think about things in a different way. When China wants to present its culture it usually does something like “Splendors of the Forbidden City.” When you actually look beyond that and say let’s look at famous painters from the 18th century, it’s always hard to get exhibitions like that in China. I don’t think the curators have a lot of vision. It’s just a shame that you have to go to the Met to see an exhibition like this. This should be at the Gugong.

Richard E. Strassberg’s A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways Through Mountains and Seas, or the Penguin version, The Classic of Mountains and Seas. It’s a mythological geographical description of China … it’s full of weird mythical animals and this is a translation of it.

Do I ever judge a book by its cover? Always. If the author/publisher can’t be bothered to get the cover right, why should I read it?

Ian Johnson will appear with Michael Meyer (Last Days of Old Beijing) at "Beijing Through a Lens" at the Bookworm Literary Festival, 7pm, March 13. RMB 50. Details at The Bookworm's festival website.