100 Books Like News from Tartary

I first encountered Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel Scoop in a backpacker guesthouse in Kowloon in 1987. Some traveler had left it behind, and I read it insatiably, cover to cover, and then started again from the beginning. It was even more hilarious and bitingly satirical on the second read and is the one book I’d take along were I banished to a desert island where luggage allowance was severely restricted.

First published in 1938, Scoop delivers a timeless and elegant roasting of the profession of journalism and self-important foreign correspondents. I have to admit–up to a point–that the bumbling exploits of William Boot, the book’s reluctant protagonist, played more than a small role in my own decision to both pick up a camera and put pen to paper!

Another classic—this one, from 1955, which was twice made into a movie, in 1958 and in the superior 2002 remake, with Brendan Frazier and Michael Cain. The Quiet American is described as many things—as a Vietnam war book, as a critique of American imperialist impulses. But at heart, it’s the story of a love triangle.

And the woman at the center of the love triangle, Phuong, is an all-time favorite character of mine. With watchful attention and subtle silences, she dictates the fate of the two men. More important than anything we ever see her say are the things we see her do and not do. 

I love the novel’s spare prose and its observations and asides, which are astute and oftentimes quite funny. And in the book’s pages, Vietnam, in the years just before the disastrous French then American wars, comes vividly to life. But Phuong is the reason… show more.

The Way of the World details a journey made in 1953 from Geneva to the Khyber Pass in an unreliable Fiat. The elements of adventure, reportage, whimsy and hope are gathered in this permanent resident of my bookshelf. I often re-read this book, penned from the diaries of then-24-year-old Nicholas Bouvier, and wish I had been born 40 years earlier so that I could have joined him and his artist friend Thierry Vernet on their epic road trip!

Bouvier, a Swiss national cited as a "traveler, writer, and photographer," transcends these rather workaday classifications in this seminal volume, becoming more philosopher and poet–the narrator of a timeless, haunting prose classic and one that echoes the escapades of Robert Byron in his book, The Road to Oxiana, a generation earlier. 

Robert Capa is the photographer I admire most. He died young, but he is forever remembered for his early work in the Spanish Civil War and later during the D-Day landings of WW2. His images and his character were, of course, much more nuanced, and I think he, of all the Magnum photographers, gets closest to capturing the human element of both war and its aftermath.

Whenever I begin to doubt why I continue in the thankless task of photojournalism, I read Capa’s Slightly Out of Focus again. Yes, the Hungarian emigre tells a tall tale, and his friend Ernest Hemingway helped him brush up the text—which was originally intended as a screenplay—but, my God, what a humorous and inspiring autobiographical record of Capa’s adventures in World War 2 this is! 

This is a first book, covering Aiyar’s years in China as a political correspondent for the Indian Express and The Hindu. Because she is Indian, Aiyar’s perspective differs from Americans’ viewpoints, which drew me, as I’ve been to both India and China. Aiyar tracks the impact of rapid growth on her informants’ sense of self and place—and then compares China’s growth to India’s. It’s a fast-paced, lively book featuring lots of interaction between Aiyar and her students, their families, and other informants—a thoughtful portrait of a culture shifting from tradition into an unknowable future, written by a journalist constantly aware of the radical differences between Indian and “new Chinese” values and sensibilities.  

Not all the struggles of Asians are with Western societies. There are also divisions and rivalries within Asia, including, sadly, between the two Asian giants: India and China. Kanti Bajpai’s book explains the complex, neurotic relationship between the two Asian powers well. Former Indian PM Manmohan Singh once wisely observed, “The world is large enough to accommodate the growth ambitions of both India and China.”

A decade after he said that China and India clashed again in the Himalayas in June 2020, plunging relations to a new low. The Asian century will be seriously crippled if China and India don’t find a long-term modus vivendi. Bajpai’s book will help both sides understand each other better. 

I am a total tea-head, so any book about the history of how we all came to be addicts is a good start. This one is particularly gripping and reads like an adventure novel. Robert Fortune, a Scottish botanist, and industrial spy, was employed by the East India Company in 1848 to be smuggled into China and steal their tea-growing secrets. The book never flags, full of information about the opium wars, the Chelsea Physic garden and how the tea, later found to grow naturally in India, was made into a consumer product garnering enormous profits. As I grew up with a family member who disappeared to work in Assam tea gardens just before I was born, I have always been fascinated by this way of life.

This is a jewel of a book. It takes a strange coincidence and weaves it into a wonderful tale of world history. It explores the lives of three Scotsmen, all called George Smith but not related, who traded in Asia during the eighteenth century, a crucial time for the development of the East India Company and ties between East and West. It really opens a window into the lives of these pioneers and brings this neglected history alive. In particular, it complicates the usual story of the East India Company by showing how it was a force for stability in trade with China and it was the ‘free traders’ taking inspiration from people like the economist Adam Smith back in London, who upset the relations and created the conditions for the nineteenth-century Opium War.

Bertil Lintner’s many books on Myanmar were essential background material for me when I lived there doing my own research on the country’s never-ending civil war. Land of Jade is a vivid and insightful study of Myanmar’s conflicts, and my favorite of his works. In 1985, he struck out to walk on foot from India, across northern Myanmar (then Burma), and eventually into southwestern China. The journey was the first (and likely only) time a journalist would undertake such an arduous, dangerous, and unforgettable trek.

His hosts along the way were a bewildering array of rebel groups at war against Myanmar’s despotic authoritarian regime. Accompanying Lintner on the journey was his pregnant wife Hseng Noung, whose photographs of Myanmar’s rugged northern terrain further enhance this incredible travelogue. 

The best way to start one’s reading about Japanese history is to pick a short overview written by an expert who writes well. This decades-old book is a splendid example of that and still the best in my opinion. Hall was an American who grew up in prewar Japan and spent his later years as a distinguished scholar of premodern Japanese history at Yale University. The book is a joy to read and identifies the main historic events from prehistoric time up through the American occupation that ended in 1952.