Populating an unordered list from values in a JSON file
What you're looking for is JSON.parse. It's not in the Node docs, because it's "lower" than that: Every modern javascript runtime has it (see MDN).

Here's a simple function to read a file, parse it as JSON, and send it to a callback (all in Node)

function readJSONFile(filename, callback) {
  require("fs").readFile(filename, function (err, data) {
    if(err) {
      callback(err);
      return;
    }
    try {
      callback(null, JSON.parse(data));
    } catch(exception) {
      callback(exception);
    }
  });
}


In keeping with Node conventions (and just mirroring readFile itself), you pass it a callback with this signature: function(err, json). E.g.

readJSONFile("path/to/file.json", function (err, json) {
  if(err) { throw err; }
  console.log(json);
});


You can make a none-async one if you prefer, but Node's nature is async.