Isham Cook

A leftist Australian acquaintance of mine who despises the U.S. trashed this book as he felt it hadn't explained the full extent of U.S. violence in Vietnam. A U.S. citizen myself, I'm no fan of the U.S. Government either, and I've read Chomsky & Herman's After the Cataclysm, which should also be required reading for anyone learning about the Indochina War. I found Hastings' a worthy, balanced account and far from being U.S-biased, would enlighten many Americans about the extent of racist genocide carried out by their government, while retaining for the public record the significant violence carried out by the North Vietnamese toward civilians in both the North and the South.

It's been called one of the greatest Chinese novels of the 20th century, and rightly so, for its literary sophistication, biting comedy of manners, and the tragic implications of social relations in 1930s China. There is no happy or sentimental resolution to the slow-motion collapse of the failed university-lecturer protagonist's failed marriage to a dull woman. Qian's observations are keen and details telling, such as this concise portrait of a woman sitting in a restaurant filing her nails (substitute Chinese woman in Starbucks today fiddling with iPhone): “She raised her head, her face filled with an expression of solemn unapproachability, as though having been wronged by men in a previous life, she was still keeping her guard up in this one. She looked him over a moment, shot her red lips over toward the left, then lowered her head and continued filing away at her nails.”

Megalomaniac billionaire C. Linus Maxwell invents a dildo that enables him to control women's bodies remotely - and cause them to go sexually insane or kill them as he wishes. Comic-book satire that completely flouts the plausible yet nonetheless gets one thinking and is disturbingly reminiscent of real-world technofascists such as Peter Thiel and Alex Karp of Palantir.

Miller's vulgarity fetish and absence of coherent narrative are welded into a solid and memorable whole by his relentlessly inventive and gorgeous English. And you can see how Jack Kerouac picked up where Miller left off.

Now considered a modern classic and a reference text for the polyamory movement, showing that the urge to engage sexually with multiple people is both natural and grounded in nature.