Category Archives: Books

In addition to On Writing, I also bought Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie for 11 kuai outside of the Chaoyangmen subway station. The fonts on each page are all the same size, and the pages aren’t distorted, but the subtitle on the front cover reads “an old man, a young man, ife’s greatest lesson”. Rather […]

I picked up Stephen King’s On Writing outside the Chaoyangmen subway station a week or so ago before meeting Ray for lunch. The paperback cost eleven kuai, it came wrapped in plastic, and the words on some of the pages were large and somewhat distorted, as if the book had been lifted off of the […]

Miracle at Philadelphia surprised me. I picked it up at Mike’s place on a whim, along with a pile of other books that looked interesting. It sat on my shelf at home for a couple of months before I picked it up one day to start reading. The 1966 original publication date turned me off, […]

My grandmother gave me a copy of Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope for Christmas this year. I finally got around to reading it while filming in Fujian last month. In short, at this point I’m probably going to vote for Obama. First of all, the book is a great read. It’s organized into broadly-titled […]

When I was home over the Spring Festival holiday, I saw a copy of The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle, sitting around my parent’s house. I read the introduction on a trip to the bathroom (I can’t seem to get off this bathroom theme), and packed the book in my bag when we left […]

I first learned about Robert Cialdini’s work on the “psychology of persuasion” from Mike when he brought copies of an article by Cialdini to our super-secret Tuesday discussion group. The article outlined Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion and intrigued me enough that I did some searching online and downloaded a talk of Cialdini’s from Audible. […]