Bookshelf: Jeremy Goldkorn, Founder of Danwei.com (and editor of TBJ's very first issue)

The book on my shelf with the most sentimental value is a beautiful old illustrated hardback copy of The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. My uncle gave the book to my mother as a tenth birthday present in 1951; my mother gave it to me for a birthday gift many years later.

The person in Beijing whose bookshelf I’d most like a peek at is Xi Jinping [China’s Vice President].

If you only ever read one book about China, make it China Candid by Sang Ye.

Are there books that I pretend to have read? When I arrived in China in early 1995, Amazon.com did not yet have a website and there were no decent foreign language bookstores in Beijing. But you could buy a huge selection of classic novels at the Wangfujing Foreign Language Bookstore. Whereas I had previously pretended to have read War and Peace and the complete works of Jane Austen and Dickens, by the end of my first year in China, I had actually read the lot.

My bathroom reading? Print magazines. Sanlian Life Weekly, Caixin, the New Yorker and the Economist to impress guests; trash like FHM and Vice for me to read.

The book I hid before you came around? I used to hide my large collection of crime thrillers and pulp novels, but now I am too old to care what you think.

The book that changed my life? I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being when I was a teenager and then decided to study European literature at college. I blame Milan Kundera for everything that went wrong since then.

The last book I read was Diamonds, Gold, and War: The Making of South Africa by Martin Meredith.

The book I’ve been most disappointed by is everything Milan Kundera wrote after The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The book I’d like to see adapted is The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung – into both a play and a movie.

The fictional world I’d most like to be part of is the one in Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda.

A book that would work well posted bit by bit on social media would be anything by William Gibson and anything by Dickens, although the books may have to be shortened a little to allow for our 21st century attention deficit disorder.

Click here to see the October issue of the Beijinger in full.

Photo: Ben Marcom