The title has quite obviously given away the point of this post, which is to announce our shiny, new and improved Asia book list! Over the course of the past four months, the flair panel has been collaborating on creating a new list to take advantage both of the expertise of the current panel and certain features of the platform which we had not previously made use of, and now we are done! The old lists have since been relegated to a legacy section (links to these will be found at the end of both this post and each of the new booklist pages), and in their place we have new lists of recommendations for numerous areas of East Asian, Central and Himalayan, and South and Southeast Asian history, with 158 books in all!

Before I link to them, though…

What’s changed?

Flairtext: This is the biggest and most obvious change. One especially nice feature of Reddit’s formatting is that, with a little wizardry, you can use flair text in posts, comments and wiki pages, which, in the case of this sub, means we have been able to introduce a system of colour coded tagging. Each entry on the list now has at least two tags – difficulty and category.

1. The difficulty tag marks out the level of complexity, specialisation and necessary background knowledge, and can be:

   1. Entry-Level – Relatively easy to get into especially for a lay audience.
   2. Intermediate – Still not hard to get into but with a little more complexity at the conceptual level.
   3. Advanced – Mainly aimed at a more academic audience.
   4. PhD-Level – Definitely for academic purposes.

2. The category tag(s) indicate the content areas the book covers, and can include any number of the following self-explanatory categories:

   1. Overview/General
   2. Political
   3. Social
   4. Economic
   5. Cultural
   6. Religious
   7. Military
   8. Primary Source(s)
   9. Other – (please specify)

Slightly more information: While our old entries always had authors and usually had publication dates, we’ve made sure to include date of publication and ISBN-13 numbers for all publications just to make searches on external sites a little easier. Additionally, we’ve tried to make sure that all the mini-reviews have a reasonable level of detail and to include the recommending flair’s handle at the end. This will help if a user wants to ask for further information on a particular recommendation.

Revamped regions and periodisation: Thanks to the absolutely brilliant variety of flairs we have, the old periodisation has proven a little overly simple. The periods covered for each region have generally been increased, and indeed we’ve added a couple of extra regional categories for Taiwan and Hong Kong (for obviously objective, neutral and non-ideological reasons) as well as regrouped Southeast Asia somewhat.

Amazon affiliate links: Whilst affiliate links have always been part of the booklist, some entries may link straight to Amazon. Thanks to the tireless work of /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov we’ve been able to ensure that all the entries on this list have proper affiliate links, so you can feel no guilt at all with your post-Christmas shopping.

Some collateral damage: Unfortunately, due to some old flairs with expertise in certain areas having since left the panel or been unable to contribute due to real life rearing its ugly head, a few areas that were comparatively well-covered (Japan, Korea and Mongolia especially) have been much reduced in terms of entries for the time being. Not to worry, though: these new lists are by no means final and will no doubt be updated over time as the flair panel finds more books to recommend and welcomes new members to the team, and as mentioned at the beginning the old lists will still be linked to at the bottom of the new ones if there’s an area you’re interested in that has received poor coverage.

But enough about the changes. Now for the lists themselves!

The New Lists

East Asia

South and Southeast Asia

Central Asia and the Himalayas

Thanks and Acknowledgements

As Reddit doesn’t let you tag more than 3 users in a post, I will put these in a series of comments below just so everyone who was involved is aware.

Statistics

Just for fun, I made spreadsheets to keep track of progress, and I made some charts with them! Below are charts for East Asia, South and Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the whole list, showing the distribution of regions of coverage, difficulty ratings, dates of publication and categories covered. (Please note that yes, there is no consistent scale on the bar charts, as the number of books in each region and the spread of categories varied heavily and I wanted to show the detail well.)

East Asia

South and Southeast Asia

Central Asia and Himalayas

Full List

Just to make a few observations on this data:

• We’re pretty up to date, with the majority of recommendations being from the past two decades and just under 25% published before 1990.
• We’ve generally got a good amount of breadth in terms of categories, albeit with a general lack of economic history in general, East Asian religious history and Central Asian social history. Something for future flairs, perhaps?
• In terms of difficulties we’ve got a reasonable spread. Obviously PhD-level stuff is in the minority, but we’ve got a reasonable spread of difficulties on the whole.

And finally some trivia:

• The most heavily covered region in the booklist is undoubtedly China with 55 books (59 if we include Taiwan and Hong Kong), making it just over a third of the list as a whole.
• The most heavily covered subcategory is Late Imperial China with 29 entries, just ahead of pre-colonial Southeast Asia with 27 (if we combine the mainland and maritime regions.)
• 7 entries are anthologies, either as single volumes or series.
• The most recommended author is M. C. Ricklefs, 6 of whose books are included in the Southeast Asia section.

Penultimate Word

So, there you have it! We hope you have a great holiday season and we hope the recommendations are useful!

Legacy Lists

East Asia

South and Southeast Asia

Central Asia and the Himalayas