2) Mountaintop Love

Mountaintop Love took Li as long as 17 years to conceive and four months to finish. Li Ao regards this 330,000-word novel as one of the most important works he has written and claims t he rendered all his thoughts and concepts to it.

Mountaintop Love is about a mother and daughter who fall in love with the same man. At the age of 20, the mother goes to a room on the mountain to meet her lover. Thirty years later, her daughter comes to the same room and meets with the same man without any semblance of an idea that her lover is the man of her unacquainted mother who dies of an amniotic fluid embolism. She succeeds the life and love of her mother and is kept unaware of the fact at the end of the book.

3) Red 11

Red 11 is Li's newest novel is written is black humor, recording to some extent his own experience in prison, in effect, written in tears of blood.

In the story, a 38-year dissident writer is put into prison in Taipei in the last 70s. The learned respectable writer chats with inmates about and comments on numerous unjust cases in Taiwan. It also expresses Li's resentment of the dark history of discords and conflicts in the Kuomintang Party.

"The debts are to be paid back," Li says, "which I've never failed to remember."

 The Firm and Pungent Critic - Li Ao the Politician

Li participated in the "presidential" election in 2000 as candidate for the New Party. Li usually takes the role as the political gadfly, and his campaign was largely symbolic. He took the election as an opportunity to "educate" people in Taiwan. Both he and his party publicly encouraged people to vote for James Soong to the point of stating during the "presidential" debates that he was not planning to vote for himself and that people should vote for Soong.
Since the 2000 presidential election, Li has bitterly spoken against Lee Teng-hui for corruption. In October 2004 Li ran in the December 11 legislative election as a non-party candidate in the South Taipei constituency, for which he was subsequently elected in the last winning place. He took office on February 1, 2005.

Li believes that the unification of China is inevitable and at one point advocated immediate surrender. He thinks that if reunification came earlier, it would be more beneficial for Taiwan.

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