Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Crichton - Prey
Hershmann - Tales of the Master Race
Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Ye Zhaoyan - Nanjing 1937: A Novel

Non-fiction

Chang, Halliday - Mao, The Unknown Story
Cremo et al - Chant And Be Happy
Deacon - A History of the Chinese Secret Service
Goetz et al - Java Concurrency In Practice
Heartney - Postmodernism
Leavitt, Dubner - Freakonomics
Plato - The Republic
Turchin - War and Peace and War
Wang Zheng - Women in the Chinese Enlightenment
Warnock - Making Babies: Is There A Right To Have Children?

There are no prizes for guessing my interests. A few standouts.

Lies

Tales of the Master Race was a remarkable book. It's a series of interlinked short stories set around a fictional German village during the Nazi years. Hershmann sidles up to the theme by foregrounding the people's everyday concerns, little human dramas of loneliness and infidelity in a time of war. The war machine and the final solution are just out of shot, looming over the stories though rarely referred to inline. To underline this, the stories are interleaved with copies of real documents like concentration camp admission forms. One of the chapters, The Parade, is also one of the finest short stories I've read.

I enjoyed Nanjing 1937 even though it uses all sorts of tricks I find infuriating in historical novels, particularly fictional lives that happen to touch on an array of historical big names. Probably just orientalism on my part. Saucier than I expected.

Half truths

Chang and Halliday's book is a fine piece of substantiated anti-Mao propaganda. They do seem to have used a lot of primary sources no-one else can get to though. The historians are going to be arguing about the man for a few decades yet.

Deacon's history of the Chinese Secret Service is a peculiar book I found second hand. It's more a series of anecdotes than a history as such, so it was interesting when the anecdotes were interesting or new, and tedious when he bangs on about the Inscrutability of the Unique Chinese Mind. When Deacon wrote this in the seventies he was a Daily Telegraph journalist, and does hit more than a few cliches implied by that identity. Also interesting to contrast with the Mao biography and how no-one in the west had much of a clue what was going on at the time. In the writing of the book, Deacon conducted something named Operation Jackdaw, an amateur intelligence gathering effort co-ordinated by himself. He then detailed none of what I anticipated would be the most interesting part of the book.

Peter Turchin is an ecologist who has done fascinating work applying mathematical techniques from ecology to the history of human empires. War and Peace and War is his pop science introduction to it. Very enjoyable, though not much in the way of maths, and the last chapter on current events is a bit flaky - presumably included at the prompting of his publisher. His cliodynamics site is pretty good and includes more detail and links.

Women In The Chinese Enlightenment deserves a better review than I have space for here. I would say projects like this, uncovering rich sources of material previously elided from the historical record, mostly justify all this postmodern talk of competing narratives, if not totally excuse the amount of space devoted in this book to terms like "configuring a new subjectivity". Speaking of which, these humanities theorists have of late co-opted great swathes of scientific and technical jargon, I think it's time to steal some back.

Java Concurrency In Practice is clear, intelligent and well-informed, really everything a technical reference of this nature should be. Very well-controlled use of metaphor.

Crushed Neurons

All western philosophy is supposed to be but footnotes to Socrates. After reading The Republic, I can only imagine they are quite long footnotes that say "actually that's complete bollocks". A systematic police state run by eugenically bred philosopher-king elites? Why is that so great, exactly?

I know, I know, there's a lot more to it than that, there's the all so famous analogy of the cave, and so on. Nevertheless I don't think I would have taken much from it without the introduction and footnotes pointing out how sloppy some of the arguments are, how crucial others, and how others still have been taken far too literally in the past.