BEST READS FOR 2006

As promised here are some notes on the four titles I presented on National Radio yesterday as my best reads for 2006. Choosing 4 titles from around 200 read during the year was a difficult task and I reckon on reviewing the year that I probably could have listed almost 40 best reads. One title I read over the holidays, but since I advised National Radio of my selection before Christmas, would certainly have gone to the top of my list and that was Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks (Vintage) and I will write at more length about that one in the next week.

So the four titles were:

The Murder Room and The Lighthouse by P.D.James (treated by me as one title for the purposes of the programme. Penguin paperbacks.

My French Life) by Vicki Archer . Lantern Hardcover.

Brief Lives by Chris Price . AUP.

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby - Viking Harcover.


So firstly the two P.D.James titles -





P.D.James will be 87 years of age this year and remarkably she is still writing one of her crime novels most years. She retired in 1979 from a senior position in the Police Department in London where she had worked in both the forensic science and criminal policy departments. No doubt this experience has stood her in good stead over the years as one of the great contemporary crime novelists.
She has been a widow for more than 40 years and I notice that one of these titles is dedicated to the memory of her late husband while the other is dedicated to her two sons-in-law.
I enjoy well-written crime fiction but I reckon it gets a raw deal from the literary community in the way it is snobbishly excluded from the major literary awards.
These two books, each around the 500 page mark,make great plane reading and in fact I read one while flying to Europe last September and the other on the way back.
Like all successful crime writers, (interesting that so many of the leading exponents are women),P.D.James has her own special character who is featured in all her 20 or so novels. He is Commander Adam Dalgliesh, a poetry writing cop who has had a long & distinguished police career and today is very senior indeed being a Assistant District Commander to the Commissioner of Police.
All of James' titles are good old-fashioned, complex whodunnits. Someone has been murdered, in these two case one on a remote Cornish island and the other in a museum on Hampstead Heath, the stories take place over several days,and there are always a dozen or so potential suspects - having read all of her books I don't believe I have ever correctly guessed the culprit.

My French Life by Vicki Archer





I think even if I hadn't actually read this book it would still be on my favourite list - that is because it is such an utterly gorgeous physical object, a book that is just a joy to hold and to own.
From its stunning dust jacket and padded cover to the beautiful,vibrant photographs throughout, (photos by Carla Coulson), it is a knockout!
It belongs in the genre started by Peter Mayle with his late 80's title A Year in Provence. I recall at the time being enchanted by that book and as the genre developed I became addicted to it! (Actually I have a number of book addictions including crime fiction, cookbooks,books of quotations, and books about books). I think I have over the intervening years read pretty much every book in this genre, some wonderful and some not. You know the plot - ex-pat Brits, Americans, Aussies and others writing about their experiences of heading off to some gorgeous place, usually in France or Italy, where they convert a ruined house or farmhouse or apartment into something wonderful and live happily ever after.
Vicki Archer and her husband are the latest ex-pats made good, they are Sydneysiders transferred to London and subsequently they fulfill a long held dream when they buy and restore a 17th century framhouse in St.Remy de Provence. They also restored abandoned orchards, planted an olive grove with more than 200 tress and along the way fell in love with all things French.
A breathtakingly beautiful book with an absorbing text that once you pick up you will not want to put down.
I previously reviewed this title on my blog in December.

Brief Lives by Chris Price - Auckland University Press





Chris Price is a published poet, a former long-term director of the NZ Arts Festival Writers and Readers Week, a teacher of creative writing at Victoria University, a former editor of Landfall and as well she is a singer and musician and more besides.
I suppose with this sort of hugely varied professional background I shouldn't have been surprised at the eclectic nature of this collection of her writings. But dammit I was taken by surprise and I cannot ever recall reading any other book quite like this one. It is a real genre buster and goodness knows which category the publishers will submit it in for the Montana NZ Book Awards because you can put your last dollar on that they will be nominating it.
You see it is neither a collection of verse nor a collection of essays and yet it is both of these but also included are pieces of memoir and biography,perhaps also extracts from diaries and letters? Who knows? Only Chris Price. Sopme peices are written in the first person so you are never quite sure you are reading something from the author's life or a piece of contemplative fiction. Some pieces are only a few sentences long while the longest piece runs to more than 40 pages.
It is a great collection of writing, albeit at times quite capricious. I was entertained, mentally provoked, fascinated, occasionally confused, but delighted throughout.
And for a quite small paperback the design and production are superb, (hats off to A.U.P.), it might have been published a hundred years ago with its use of woodcuts, vintage prints and engravings.
It is the sort of eccentric and appealing book that I am proud to have on my shelves.

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby.Sub-title - The diary of an occasionally exasperated but ever hopeful reader.




This reads like a blog but in book form and in fact it is a collection of all of Nick Hornby's Stuff I've Been Reading columns originally published in the rather special American literary magazine The Believer. Through 28 monthly accounts through to June 2006 he tells us of the books bought and the books read, of a trip to a literary festival, on becoming a father again along with his musings on Bob Dylan, Flaubert and others.
Largely he seems to have a dislike for book reviewers, and yet in this book he is indeed a book revewer himself. He suggests that "being paid to review a book and then write about it creates a dynamic which compromises the reviewer in all kinds of ways, very few of them being helpful".
This rather disingenuous criticism aside I have to say I greatly admire Hornby's writing - Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About A Boy ,all of which have been made into movies by the way, and I greatly enjoyed this latest one too which is of course very different to any of his other writing as it is a collection of essays. He clearly loves reading, one assumes he does little else apart from writing, and it is most interesting to read his coomments about various writers as well as his general comments on literature along the way.
His advice if you are reading abook and not enjoying it? Put it aside and read something else. I'm with him on that one.
Readable, entertaining with the occasional hearty laugh.