Love Medicine, written by Louise Erdrich and originally published in 1984, was reprinted in 1993 by HarperPerennial Library when the author added five new chapters to the novel. This book is a series of interwoven stories about different generations in a Native American family. In 1985, Amy Tan read this book and was influenced heavily by it when she wrote The Joy Luck Club.

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The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, originally published in 1976, is a memoir of a Chinese-American girl growing up in Stockton, California. There are two worlds that the girl lives between, America—the place her parents emigrated to—and China, which the girl hears about in her mother’s ‘‘talk-stories.’’ Written by Maxine Hong Kingston, the first critically successful Asian-American writer in the United States, the book helped pave the way for Asian-American writers like Amy Tan.

How To Think in Chess was written by Jan Przewoznik and Marek Soszynski and was published in 2001 by Russell Enterprises. This book uses psychological experiments to show how professional chess players really think, how they ‘‘see’’ the chessboard. It then teaches readers to examine their own thought process when playing chess, so that they will be able to discover how they may be limiting their potential.

The Bonesetter’s Daughter, by Amy Tan, was published in 2002 by Ballantine Books. This book is about a mother who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and becomes determined to write a record of her birth and family history, so that she will not forget the details of her life as her memory continues to deteriorate. Her daughter, a ghost writer for self-help books, has little knowledge of her mother’s history. The daughter becomes determined to improve the bad relationship she has with her mother and to try to find out who her mother really is before she loses the opportunity forever.

The Kitchen God’s Wife , Amy...