What's on Your Bookshelf? Philip Tinari of LEAP Magazine

Philip Tinari, Editor-in-chief, LEAP Magazine

The book on my shelf with the most sentimental value is our first volume of LEAP – six issues and 1,312 pages of blood, sweat and brains.

The last book I bought was Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, a Brooklyn novel about a failed-artist-turned college-development-officer veering toward middle age. He’s wittier than Shteyngart, and less grating. (Although I bought Super Sad True Love Story too …)

The book I pretend to have read is Dream of the Red Chamber, albeit not actively. We all need a few good gaping holes in our cultural literacy, right?

My favorite book from childhood is The Guinness Book of World Records. The illusion of comprehensiveness was so much easier to convey on paper before the Internet came along.

The book that changed my life was Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Realizing as a college sophomore that you could write essays like that was pretty huge.

The character in a book I’d like to be? I Am Adam Gellin.

Have I ever judged a book by its cover? Bill Brown’s delectable illustrations for the Back Bay editions of Evelyn Waugh are among the best reasons for doing so.

The last book I read was Just Kids by Patti Smith, a shameless but gratifying art-world tearjerker.

The book I’d like to see adapted as a film is Jonathan Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, starring Roberto Benigni as Ricci, Jiang Wen as Xu Guangqi, and the rehabilitated Zhang Ziyi as a literati Jesuit-temptress.

The book I’ve enjoyed having with me on my travels? Reading Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus on the Mongolian steppe (smooth not striated, baby) was an intellectual high, albeit in a very undergraduate, 1999 sort of way. These days, an issue of Brooklyn literary journal n+1 or Berlin style bible 032c makes the EWR-PEK hop fly by, even in economy.

The fictional world I’d most like to be part of is David Lodge’s Small World. Jet-setting was so much sexier back when deconstruction was a new idea.

The book I’d most like to see translated into Chinese is Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, an anti-dote to the trickle-down modernism that pollutes so many contemporary Chinese interiors. The passage about Yale architecture students using their diaper money to buy Barcelona chairs is priceless.

Fiction or non-fiction? Dichotomies are sooo last century.

LEAP is the international art magazine of contemporary China.

Photo: Judy Zhou