2008 BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS


Linda Herrick at the New Zealand Herald and Finlay Macdonald at the Sunday Star Times both produced extensive and excellent coverage of their own book reviewers choices of the best reading in 2008 which made for most interesting reading.
Linda Herrick has the advantage over Finlay Macdonald because Canvas magazine in the Weekend Herald is produced on art paper in full colour and the books looked most appealing, pages and pages of them. Finlay Macdonald had to settle for black and white!


Here is my contribution to the Sunday Star Times piece:



Ngaio Marsh - her life in crime
Joanne Drayton – Harper Collins
Fascinating look at the life of one of NZ’s most successful ever writers in which Drayton rekindles renewed interest in her superb crime novels.

Into the Wider World – a back country miscellany
Brian Turner – Random House
Beautifully illustrated, fine anthology featuring this remote and most appealing part of the country by NZ’s own southern man.

Fish of the Week – Selected columns
Steve Braunias – Awa Press
Gave me such pleasure re-reading his Sunday-Star Times columns, he is NZ’s funniest writer.

A book from another year – the man who writes social history in a most accessible way, (Cod, Salt and others), - Mark Kurlansky, also wrote a novel back in 2005, Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue, an enormously entertaining and often funny story of a Jewish family living on New York’s lower East Side in the 80’s, I wish he’d write another.

The book I want for Christmas is any well-written crime fiction novel that I haven’t already read.

The local publisher of the year is Random House NZ who this year were out on their own in terms of both quality and quantity covering all the genres and in particular their hugely impressive list of sumptuous big hardcover books with the highest production and design values, a golden year for them.