When I went to study abroad in London during college through Boston University, they sent me a reading list of books to thumb through before I arrived. I didn’t read a single one. London seemed familiar and I knew my British history.

China? Not so much.

When I got credentialed to cover the Olympics last year, I knew the basics. A fifth of the world’s population. A booming economy. A lot of factories taking U.S. jobs. In other words, I didn’t know a lot, so I created my own list. Check it out and cram in what you can over the next few weeks.

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Books:

• “Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China” by Peter Hessler — I grabbed this book at Strand Bookstore on complete impulse. It’s a great read. Hessler, who taught English in China, writes about his students’ and friends’ experiences in an evolving China in a way that gives you a sense of how the country’s changing and what impact that’s having on its people.

• “Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China” by Ian Johnson — This book gave the best look at the Falun Gong movement I’ve come across. Johnson uses that movement, a lawyer who challenges communist party taxation policy and a resident’s resistance to relocation as examples of the mini-uprisings that are taking place in China as the country evolves.

• “Soul Mountain” by Gao Xingjian — I have to admit, I didn’t get through this one. But I wanted to take a stab at Chinese fiction, and this is the country’s only Nobel Prize winner.

Articles:

• “Wheels of Fortune” by Peter Hessler in The New Yorker — This article gave a great look at what it’s like to drive in China. Bump into a fender? No big deal. Here’s a few yuan.

• “Angry Youth” by Evan Osnos in The New Yorker — This one talks about how defensive Chinese youth get when people like Bob Costas take shots at China. No joke. NBC issued an apology after the 1996 Olympics when Costas talked about China’s problems with human rights. And it also sheds some light on how easy it is for Chinese youth to tunnel under the firewall and get access to Western Web sites. I had no idea. They should have some of these kids in the main press center walking Western media through it.

• “Beijing’s Olympic Makeover” by William Langewiesche in Vanity Fair — This one was filled with shots at China drawing parallels between the German clean-up before the 1936 Olympics with China’s own “pre-Olympic crackdown” against “troublemakers and vocal opponents.”

• I also plowed through the Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and Time previews of the Olympics. I found the Newsweek article “China’s Agony of Defeat” by Orville Schell to be the most “new” thing out there. It floats the idea that China’s eagerness to make these Games the biggest and best in history is rooted in its inferiority complex that goes back to its historical humiliations — the Opium Wars, Japan’s invasion, etc. The Games are a chance to make good, overcome that history and reinvent themselves. We’ll see.

Television Shows:

You’ve gotta love DVR. There’s no way I’m watching a show on China unless I can record it and watch it on my own time. There were plenty of chances to do that over the last year, and here are some of the better shows I caught.

• “The Tank Man,” Frontline, PBS — You have to love the drama Frontline puts into things. “Tonight on Frontline, Tiananmen Square, June 1989. … In the wake of a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, one solitary man defied the awesome power of the Chinese state.” I admit it. I didn’t know anything about the Tiananmen Square demonstrations — except that they happened — until I saw this. Great stuff. Check it out if you’re interested.

• National Geographic’s feature on the terracotta warriors — I have no idea why I started watching this, but I’m glad I did. A month later Johnson & Johnson called and let me know they were going to have the warriors in their exhibition in the Olympic sponsor village. Here’s the story.

• Koppel’s four-part series on Discovery, “The People’s Republic of Capitalism” — This four-part series ran earlier this month. It gives a pretty good overview of how intertwined the U.S. and China economies are. We’re not rivals; we’re trading partners.

For Olympics 101, here are some basics:

• Michael Payne’s “Olympic Turnaround: How the Olympic Games Stepped Back from the Brink of Extinction to Become the World’s Best Known Brand — and a Multi Billion Dollar Global Franchise” — Wow. That’s a long title. It makes Chris Martin and Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida or Death and all His Friends” seem short. That said, it’s the best recent Olympic business book to be published.

• Peter Ueberroth’s autobiography “Made in America: His Own Story” — Not surprisingly, this book offers the best glimpse into the mind of the man at the helm of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

• Dick Pound’s “Inside the Olympics: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Politics, the Scandals and the Glory of the Games” — This touches on some of the sports business behind the Games, as well.