If you read one satire this year The Four Books, by Yan Lianke (Chatto & Windus) R315Because his poverty-stricken parents lacked the means to send him to university, Yan, arguably one of China's greatest living novelists, honed his writing skills in the Red Army producing propaganda.This withering allegory - divided into four narratives to echo classic Confucian texts and the New Testament's Gospels - details the harsh life inside a remote re-education and labour camp where authors, musicians and theologians were sent during Mao's Great Leap Forward in order that their revolutionary zeal be restored.The stakes are high enough as they are set ludicrous challenges to win their freedom - but then the Great Famine arrives.Readers might also want to seek out Yan's Serve the People!, a sexually charged 2007 novella about the bored wife of a military commander who seduces a young peasant soldier.When the lovers accidentally discover that smashing a Mao statuette greatly increases their desire, they embark on, well, a frenzy of sacrilegious destruction.The book was banned and, as it goes with censorship, the Chinese central propaganda bureau inadvertently offered up its best cover shouts: "Slanders Mao Zedong, the army, and is overflowing with sex" and "Do not distribute, pass around, comment on, excerpt from or report on it."The issueI have been sorely tempted by Penguin's nifty Little Black Classics - a collection of 80 titles to celebrate the publisher's 80th birthday at 80p each (or a mere R13 from loot.co.za).Older readers will recall that Penguin did a similar thing 20 years ago on its 60th anniversary but the new imprint, "playfully austere", as one critic put it, is less fiddly. The books fit perfectly in a jacket pocket for those of a Bohemian mien.The 2015 selection is more weighted to the 19th century and only one title, Balzac's The Atheist's Mass, is common to both collections.The titles come with no introduction but this should only spur the reader into doing some homework. No bad thing.Where to start, then? Well, The Guardian suggests getting the lot "doesn't seem like a crazy extravagance" but I'd be happy with Femme Fatale (Guy de Maupassant), Anthem for Doomed Youth (Wilfred Owen), The Life of a Stupid Man (Ryunosuke Akutagawa), Aphorisms on Love and Hate (Friedrich Nietzsche), On the Beach at Night Alone (Walt Whitman), The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman), A Hippo Banquet (Mary Kingsley) and Caligula (Suetonius). For more see littleblackclassics.comThe bottom line"The arrangement when one man had to be shared by two women was methodical, inspired by the Koranic prescription that asked every man taking more than one woman to do so only if he could do 'perfect justice' between them." - The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan, by Rafia Zakaria (Beacon Press)..