Best books...chosen by Jung Chang

Jung Chang is the best-selling author of Mao: The Unknown Story and the memoir Wild Swans. Her latest book, Empress Dowager Cixi, spotlights the onetime concubine who served as the unofficial ruler of China from 1861 to 1908.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, $12). Written in the simplest language and with not a wasted word, this sublime book moved me to an almost unbearable degree when I first read it. The old man, his friend the boy, his fish (with whom he has such a complex relationship), and the great sea—I care about them all, and they are indelibly etched into my brain.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Dover, $5). People have given different interpretations as to what this timeless classic is about. To me it is not about love thwarted by social conventions, as some seem to think; it’s about all feverish and unreserved loves, which come with a destructive and futile seed buried in them. We all lose our head once, but Anna lost hers completely.

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Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (Vintage, $14). The story of Holly Golightly is well-known enough, as we have probably all seen the Audrey Hepburn film many times. Yet the book simply dazzles with word power—like all of Capote’s classics. Norman Mailer said it all when he called Capote “the most perfect writer of my generation.”

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (Dover, $2.50). A writer visits Venice in the hope of overcoming a creative block and becomes entranced by a beautiful boy. Mann’s novella is completely satisfying, in a sensual as well as an intellectual way. I tore through it in one sitting, and only paused to say to myself, “This is why we read!”

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage, $16). Martin Amis remarked that Nabokov “writes with incomparable penetration about delusion and coercion, about cruelty and lies.” I would add that he was an unrivaled master of desire.

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov (Penguin, $15). An unforgettable novel recounting the adventures of a melancholic Russian army officer during his travels in the Caucasus. This translation is by Natasha Randall, but there is also a translation by Nabokov. I have read this book several times—once in Chinese—and the delight its magic inspires is not lost in translation.