What we were reading

Over 30 of New Zealand's top writers reveal the literary highlights of their year.

All books were released in 2011 unless otherwise stated.

Illustration Daron Parton

Pip Adam, writer, won the Best First Book Award for Fiction at this year’s New Zealand Post Book Awards for her short-story collection Everything We Hoped For: Four books really excited me this year because of their play with form. I started the year with Jennifer Egan’s A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, which I suspect I’m the target audience for, and found it touching and crafty. Francis Spufford’s RED PLENTY (2010) ran me over then reversed back for another go. Victor Hugo’s NOTRE DAME DE PARIS (1831) is writing making an argument against itself and for architecture. And although subtler in formal gymnastics, Stephanie Vaughn’s SWEET TALK (1990) is a startling emancipation of the short-story collection. I also reread LOLITA (1955) this year, discovering no one writes objects quite like Vladimir Nabokov. Speaking of Nabokov, I really enjoyed Craig Sherborne’s THE AMATEUR SCIENCE OF LOVE and the two books are forever linked in my head. Also on my reread list was Damien Wilkins’ FOR EVERYONE CONCERNED (2007) and Anna Sanderson’s BRAINPARK (2006) – both made me want to quit writing and keep trying to write all at once. I’ve also really enjoyed the new writing I’ve found in literary journals this year. Highlights include: Sport (especially the winners and finalists of The Long and the Short of It competition), Hue and Cry and the new 4^th Floor. Thanks for a great year’s reading.

Bernard Beckett, YA author, this year released his second adult novel, August: My favourite read in 2011 was Charlotte Randall’s HOKITIKA TOWN. Ever since The Curative, I’ve considered her to be our most impressive writer, and Hokitika Town pushes that title close as my favourite New Zealand novel. It’s smart, playful, and wry. Neither self-conscious nor self important, it’s just a wonderful celebration of time and place and story. Reading it filled me with the good sort of jealousy. Biggest reading disappointment was Jonathan Franzen’s FREEDOM (2010), which in many ways was the opposite experience. I’d loved The Corrections - how could you not? - and this is such a slip in form. I remember a  wonderful review of one of Elvis Costello’s lesser albums in the late 80s, which went “sounds like somebody trying ever so hard to make an Elvis Costello album”. Freedom is the work of an author trying to sound like Jonathan Franzen, and sadly, in this instance, his aim isn’t quite true.

Peter Bland, poet, won this year’s Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry and released new collection Coming Ashore: Every year, I reread a couple of lucky-dip extracts from two old favourites, Fernando Pessoa’s THE BOOK OF DISQUIET (1982) and John Cowper Powys’s THE COMPLEX VISION (1920). They help keep my imaginative boundaries open and alive. On the poetry scene, I’ve admired Bill Manhire’s LIFTED (2005), which I missed when if first came out, and I’ve enjoyed anything by the lovely Jenny Bornholdt. Dick Frizzell’s THE PAINTER (2009) was a delight. I’m intrigued by his take on various painterly styles and by his sheer confidence and curiosity. I suppose there’s an openly theatrical flair to his work that, as an ex-actor, I enjoy. I haven’t read any fiction this year, not even a thriller, but Joan Didion’s THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING (2005), about her grief and “madness” following her husband’s sudden death, reads like one. It confirmed my belief that love is stronger than death and that to live in doubt and mystery and loss is to be truly human.

Jenny Bornholdt, poet, released The Hill of Wool: It’s been a good year for poetry. Firstly, three books from Auckland University Press: Rhian Gallagher’s SHIFT is distinctive and marvellous. The poems are dense, intense and serious, marking the poet’s move from London to the South Island landscape, with its “…pines/serious as a church”. In THICKET, Anna Jackson’s poems are inventive, skittish, energetic, and odd, definitely worth making your way through. There are lots of animals in Janis Freegard’s first book, KINGDOM ANIMALIA: THE ESCAPADES OF LINNAEUS. The poems are strange and sometimes threatening, with Freegard definitely on the side of the animals. THE LEAF RIDE by Dinah Hawken has been a favourite, with Hawken tackling the natural world, violence, grandchildren, and a series of sonnets about construction. I’ve just finished STRANGE MEETINGS: THE POETS OF THE GREAT WAR (2010) by Harry Ricketts, a terrific account of meetings, real and imagined, between poets such as Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves. It’s lively and engaging and Ricketts manages to make you feel as though you’re in the room or sitting around a table with his subjects. I’ve also read some very good novels – my favourite being GREAT HOUSE (2010) by Nicole Krauss.

Chris Bourke, writer and broadcaster, won the Book of the Year, People’s Choice and General Non-Fiction awards at this year’s New Zealand Post Book Awards for Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918-1964, and was named judges’ convenor for next year’s awards: Paul Kelly’s “song memoir” HOW TO MAKE GRAVY (2010) is as expansive and rich in gems as Australia itself. With an A-Z of his songs providing structure, it is digressive, thoughtful and honest. He is a streetwise raconteur with a sense of history and a guitar always at hand. With maternal grandparents who were Italian opera singers, and an Irish-Australian father who was a Shakespeare-quoting friend of Don Bradman, Kelly’s love of music and storytelling combine to shape his greatest work and perhaps the most literary and substantial musician’s memoir. (Against this, Bob Dylan’s Chronicles is just an aperitif.) He talks of the joys of big families, touring the outback and the world, wasting years and losing relationships while dabbling in heroin, collaborations with Aboriginal musicians, the art of songwriting – and endless summers of cricket. Plus, lyrics and lists, including a recipe for gravy and Gary Puckett’s uncompiled concept album. This book – and the best songs – keep nagging you, “like a tongue with a loose tooth”. Also this year, Jonathan Raban’s essay collection DRIVING HOME (2010), the Englishman’s exile on Main Street, USA; and Preston Lauterbach’s THE CHITLIN’ CIRCUIT AND THE ROAD TO ROCK’N'ROLL: black rhythm, blues and enterprise.

Kate Camp, poet and presenter of Kate’s Klassics on Saturday Morning with Kim Hill on Radio New Zealand National, won the Poetry award at this year’s New Zealand Post Book Awards for The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls and went to Germany as recipient of this year’s Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency: For many years, I thought the poet Rainer Maria Rilke was a woman. In my world, guys aren’t called Maria. I had been astonished years ago by his famous poem Archaic Torso of Apollo (Google it, please), and when I came to Berlin in September I brought with me a copy of THE SELECTED POETRY OF RAINER MARIA RILKE (1982), edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. The Duino Elegies, in particular, were a revelation. These 10 long poems contain so much: this is poetry as wisdom text, as personal confession, as intelligent dialogue, as spiritual exploration. In their changes of subject and digressions, the poems can feel rambling, and yet there is such compression and discipline, such precision of language, even in translation. Then I discovered LETTERS OF RAINER MARIA RILKE: VOLUME II – 1910-1926 (1948). Sample extract: “I lay for almost a whole night beneath the great Sphinx, as though I had been vomited out in front of it by my whole life…”. Now I am reading William Gass’s READING RILKE: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATION (1999), an account of translating the Elegies, and of Rilke’s life. As Hass points out, this was a man of vast self-pity, needy and peevish. But he was also a man of rock solid talent and expansive vision, whose poems are every bit as good as he thought they were.

Paul Cleave, crime writer, won this year’s Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel for Blood Men and released latest novel Collecting Cooper in the US with his new American publisher, Simon and Schuster, but not yet in New Zealand: DARKNESS TAKE MY HAND (1996) by Dennis Lehane is the book that made me enjoy reading again after a long drought of books I couldn’t get into. It was a story about revenge and vigilantes – pretty much my two favourite fiction topics – plus a really nasty serial killer. I just read WITHOUT FAIL (2002) by Lee Child – once again, brilliant. So much fun to see Jack Reacher again; I could read about Jack Reacher going to a dentist appointment and I’d still love it. I read Neil Cross’s CAPTURED (2010) and wish I had written it – it’s dark and mean, made so much better by the fact Neil is a really cool guy. THE FALLEN (2010) by Ben Sanders is really good – he’s gonna be a household name in a few years and Kiwis need to discover him. And I’m currently reading HORNS (2010) by Joe Hill (Stephen King’s son), which is a horror, and this guy is phenomenally talented – to the point where reading his stuff makes me want to give up writing because I could write for a thousand years and never come up with anything as good as him.

David Cohen, writer, journalist and media commentator, released Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys’ Home: Ann Coulter’s DEMONIC is a brilliant if at times slightly unhinged excoriation of mass-demonstrations that arrived just in time to offer its energetically amusing antidote to what in its latest manifestation is the Occupy movement. I enjoyed it nearly as much as ROCK AND ROLL WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE (2010), onetime rock critic Steve Almond’s drooling memoir of his time in the biz, which also struck me down with a particularly nasty bout of writer’s envy. Sarah Bakewell’s HOW TO LIVE: A LIFE OF MONTAIGNE IN ONE QUESTION AND TWENTY ATTEMPTS AT AN ANSWER is another surprisingly timely work, reconnecting the fabulous Frenchman who invented the personal essay some 500 years ago with a generation of new readers who might think that the practice of blogging one’s thoughts every day in the tower of song is something terribly new. And a couple of other books now slightly out of date really stood out for me. THE LOOMING TOWER (2006) is American journalist Lawrence Wright’s forensically traced history of the road leading to 9/11 – and who knows what else in the years immediately ahead of us – that reads like a theocratic thriller. I also loved Jess Walters’s delicious fictional take on business journalism, silly websites and marital pratfalls, THE FINANCIAL LIVES OF THE POETS (2009).

Michael Corballis, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Auckland, released two books: The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization and Pieces of Mind: 21 Short Walks Around the Brain: My writing and reading in 2011 were largely about brains, bullshit and recursion. Iain McGilchrist’s THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY (2009), the latest take on the left and right brains, perversely puts the right brain in charge as the Master and the left (usually considered dominant) as the sometimes wilful Emissary. They battle it out in a brilliant, insightful account of cultural, religious and political fluctuations through the centuries, but as brain science it’s mostly bullshit. Rebecca Goldstein’s novel 36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD (2009) is about a philosopher who has written a book acclaimed only for its appendix listing 36 arguments for the existence of God. Recursively, the novel itself has an appendix listing 36 arguments for the existence of you know whom. It’s farcical and funny, although deeply rooted in the Jewish intelligentsia of East Coast USA. At times also funny, but sad, is Alan Hollinghurst’s THE STRANGER’S CHILD, depicting upper-class English life from pre-World War I decadence to end-of-century decay. In contrast, I found the winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, Julian Barnes’s THE SENSE OF AN ENDING, to be rather plodding, until redeemed by the spectacular twist at the end.

Neil Cross, author and film and television screenwriter, saw the second season of his TV series Luther screened and released a spin-off novel, Luther: The Calling: Hampton Sides’s HELLHOUND ON HIS TRAIL (2010), an account of events leading up to and following the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr kept me awake at night. King emerges as exhausted and defiant. His assassin is a freakish kind of almost-man, a pale spectre drawn from the dark racist heart of the last century. I’d avoided Joe Hill’s HORNS (2010) because I disliked the synopsis and wasn’t sure about the title. I was an ass. Horns is a thriller and in some ways a horror novel. And almost incidentally, it’s a refined investigation into the nature of good and evil. It made me cry. TS Eliot’s masterpiece THE WASTE LAND came to the iPad with joyous results. Modernism and hyperlinks were made for each other: Eliot’s language is essentially a wilderness of them. Here’s the future, if not of books, then certainly of great poetry. Apparently without effort (which of course testifies to enormous effort), Michael Connelly continues to write the best procedural and legal thrillers in the world, including this year THE FIFTH WITNESS. The iconic blue collar miniaturist Raymond Carver was blessed and cursed to have Gordon Lish for an editor. BEGINNERS (2009) is an unadaulterated  - which is to say, unedited - version of Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It’s both fascinating and troubling to consider the degree of influence Lish exerted, and to ponder exactly where in this relationship the genius lay.

Joan Druett, maritime historian and novelist, released Tupaia: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Polynesian Navigator: I enjoyed three titles of maritime fiction, spanning the three ages of man. First, a children’s book, THE TRAVELLING RESTAURANT by Barbara Else. Plenty of maritime jokes for adults (which I enjoyed immensely), yet recommended as a tremendously good read by grandson Matthew and his friends. Second, a young adult book, STAR-CROSSED (2006) by Linda Collison – an unfortunate title and a really bad jacket for a really good yarn about sailing under canvas in exciting days, the character being a teenaged female stowaway, destined to be a cross-dressed sailor, with seaborne surgery in her future. Third, an adult literary novel, with plenty of really adult jokes, called SEA OF POPPIES (2008), by Man Booker near-winner Amitav Ghosh. Over-crowded with flamboyant characters (who are usually endearing if they are Indian, while the British are usually just caricatures), but nonetheless a great book, because of the highly diverting fun the author had playing with maritime words.

Andrea Eames is a Texas-based Zimbabwean who wrote her first novel, The Cry of the Go-Away Bird, while living in Christchurch: It was a year of revisiting for me. Rather than seeking out new titles, I became reacquainted with favourite books and authors as I settled in to the United States (comfort reading?). I’ve been on a Doris Lessing binge – THE GRASS IS SINGING (1950) has always been a favourite, but now I have also discovered THE SUN BETWEEN THEIR FEET (1973), a vivid collection of African stories, and HUNGER (1953), an amazing novella that I really wish were longer and more developed. I haven’t moved on to Lessing’s cat stories yet, but with two cats of my own, it’s surely only a matter of time. GIFTED (2010) by Patrick Evans was my New Zealand highlight. I was lucky enough to have Patrick as my MFA supervisor, and I was so looking forward to reading his novel. Janet Frame was the first New Zealand author with whom I fell in love – her New Zealand set the stage for mine – and Gifted brings her to life in an unexpected way.

Fiona Farrell, poet, novelist and essayist, released The Broken Book: Starting with the most recent, Sue Wootton’s BY BIRDLIGHT, a collection of poems remarkable for their inventiveness, grace and range of reference. Then THE LARNACHS by Owen Marshall for its quiet depiction of fierce passions: I love the way good fiction adds its layers to actual landscape. (The volcanic cones of Auckland have never been the same since Maurice Gee and the Wilberforces.) Marshall’s writing charges that castle on Otago Peninsula. Then THE SNAKEHEAD (2009) by Patrick Radden Keefe: a journalistic record of a people-smuggling operation from China to New York that blends the pace and style of contemporary documentary with the squalor, vigor and humanity of Dickensian narrative. Then OLIVE KITTERIDGE by Elizabeth Strout, published in 2008 but I’ve only just discovered it: 13 interlocking short stories about a retired and bossy maths teacher in a New England town. Sounds deadly but it’s fantastic. And finally Claire Keegan’s FOSTER (2010), which I would never have read had I not heard her speak at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival. Exquisite, heart stopping.

Laurence Fearnley, novelist, won the Fiction award at this year’s New Zealand Post Books Awards for The Hut Builder: I like poetry and this year I have enjoyed a new collection by Dunedin poet Sue Wootton, BY BIRDLIGHT. To me, poetry seems very three-dimensional and I’m attracted to construction, the arrangement of the words on the page, the sounds and rhythms. I admire the way Wootton weighs each word and imparts the negative spaces with meaning. One piece of writing has lingered in my mind since first reading it back in May. And that is Wellington writer Laurence Patchett’s long short-story “The Road to Tokomairiro”, which was published in THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT competition anthology. Patchett is both an incredibly intelligent writer and a thoughtful one, too. His writing is beautifully paced and this helps him create complex characters that are, on the one hand, inward looking and yet, on the other, full of compassion and understanding for their fellow human beings. A book I came to sideways – as a piece of research for a novel I am working on about “motion” - is RUNNING WRITING ROBINSON, a collection of essays, “a gift” to runner and professor of English Roger Robinson. There is a nice sense of “randomness” in this collection and yet the breadth and depth of each contribution creates a cohesive whole – a bit like human life, I suppose.

Rick Gekoski, writer and broadcaster, divides his time between London and his wife’s family property in New Zealand, and this year was chair of the judges for the 2011 Man Booker International Prize: In June, I finished 18 months of intense reading of great international novelists – many in translation – for the Man Booker, which was awarded to Philip Roth. His latest novel, NEMESIS (2010), is an immaculate, wrenching tragedy set in a polio epidemic in Newark in 1944. It was a pleasure, though, to get back to my normal, eclectic reading patterns. Edmund de Waal’s THE HARE WITH THE AMBER EYES: A HIDDEN INHERITANCE is a masterpiece that movingly evokes his family’s painful history in an evocation of their magnificent houses and works of art. Jeanette Winterson’s memoir WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL? is dark, funny and jagged, and I was astonished by how indomitably she has made herself. THE ART OF FIELDING by Chad Harbach is one of those few books about sport (in this case baseball) that convincingly explores the fragility of sporting genius. Martin Edmond’s DARK NIGHT: WALKING WITH McCAHON evokes and reconstructs Colin McCahon’s lost hours in Sydney in 1984: a painter I greatly admire gets the writer he deserves. Plus – what fun! – a good new Lee Child (THE AFFAIR), a provocative and timely Robert Harris (THE FEAR FACTOR) and Carl Hiaasen’s antic return to form, STAR ISLAND. I read these on my new Kindle, to which I am already devoted.

Nicky Hager, writer and journalist, released Other People’s Wars: New Zealand in Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror: My reading this year was, as usual, a jumble of novels. I can’t see any pattern in them, but maybe you can. These books include a gem called THE SUMMER BOOK (1972), by the Swedish children’s book writer Tove Jansson (I recommend it), Maurice Gee’s THE SCORNFUL MOON (2003, an evocative story set in 1930s Wellington) and Jeffrey Eugenides’s MIDDLESEX (2002, clever and well written, but annoying in parts). A very different book, one I didn’t think I’d like, was THE WOMAN IN WHITE by Wilkie Collins. It was originally serialised in the 1850s in a magazine published by his friend Charles Dickens, and with it Collins was helping create a new genre of mystery/detective writing. It might seem a bit clunky if written today, but it’s a masterful piece of writing. I also reread two old favourites, John Fowles’s THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN (1969) and Joseph Heller’s CATCH-22 (1961), and (the only non-fiction book I read for enjoyment this year) got great pleasure from AN Wilson’s AFTER THE VICTORIANS (2005), a beautifully written piece of historical writing. Last but not least, I recently read the manuscript of my sister Mandy Hager’s next young adult novel, coming out in 2012: a fantastic read. My sisters and I are very proud of her!

Paul Holmes, broadcaster and columnist, released Daughters of Erebus: For most of 2010 and for the first half of this year, until I finally managed to sign off Daughters of Erebus, my reading was almost entirely to do with Erebus. So I read and reread Peter Mahon’s original accident report and his story of the inquiry itself, VERDICT ON EREBUS (1984). I managed to find my way round Stuart Macfarlane’s magnificent THE EREBUS PAPERS (1991). When Daughters was finished, I lunged into a feast of thrillers in order to unwind, especially those of the Norwegian Jo Nesbo, who’s created a brilliantly flawed detective in the form of Harry Hole, a tormented alcoholic whom most of the Oslo Crime Squad would like to be rid off, except he’s the best damn cop they’ve got. The plots are relentless. I really enjoyed Ron Mundle’s BLIGH: MASTER MARINER. He was one of the great sailors, Bligh, but I think Mundle underestimates how quickly he could piss people off. Bligh had the lethal combination of a quick temper and an acid tongue. For some reason, I picked up F Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY (1925), which I hadn’t read since the 70s, and then, on the book tour, I took with me his TENDER IS THE NIGHT (1934). Just to read the sentences, mainly. The man could not write a bad sentence. Recently, I could not put down John Follain’s DEATH IN PERUGIA, the story of the Amanda Knox saga. She’s a narcissist, I suppose, but I don’t think she killed Meredith Kercher.

Sam Hunt, poet, released Chords & Other Poems: 2011 hasn’t marked, for me, discovery of new prose or poetry so much as of a collection of photographs by William Harold Marsh. Marsh was born near Port Albert, on the Kaipara, in 1876, some years after his people had settled there as part of the free-thinking Albertland Movement. As a young man - he bought his first camera in 1901 – he developed a talent and love for photography. This comes through wonderfully, full of wonder, in the pages of IMAGES FROM ALBERTLAND. A hundred and forty restored photographs – culled from more than 7000 glass plate originals – with a text that defines the lives and backgrounds of his subjects, make up the book. Early farmers, gumdiggers, children – Marsh had six – fishermen, Ted Pook, “King of the Kaipara”, among them (he had 25), marriages, picnics, a full array of life on the shores of the Kaipara over the first two decades of last century … Paul Campbell, Northland author and journalist, has done Marsh, and his heritage, proud; they both do Kaipara, and its people, proud. I mean – a wonderful book!

Lynn Jenner won the Best First Book Award for Poetry at this year’s New Zealand Post Book Awards for her collection Dear Sweet Harry: Right now, I am reading ALL THAT I AM by Anna Funder, which tells the story of Ernst Toller and his socialist friends in their day by day fight against the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s. The novel follows them into exile in England and America and finds the last of them, old and marvellously cantankerous, in Bondi Beach. I love Funder’s clear confident prose. Another stunning book I read this year is John Mulgan’s REPORT ON EXPERIENCE (1947/2010). The book is his report, to anyone who cares to listen, on the times he has lived through. This is him on the arrival of the Depression: “Certain changes came over New Zealand at this time … It was noticeable that men stopped speaking openly to one another, and the majority favoured a doctrine that every man’s duty was to look after himself. This, of course, was the fine old flavour of the pioneers and of rugged, economic liberalism, but I think, from what I have read, that the pioneers turned out to help their neighbours in distress, and survived because they lived as a community, and not as men alone.” He knows us well.

Fiona Kidman, writer and poet, released the short-story collection The Trouble with Fire and won this year’s Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction: What a feast of first-class New Zealand books this year. As a follower of classy historical fiction, Owen Marshall’s THE LARNACHS hit the right buttons for me. It unfolds the tragic love triangle that befell the political Larnach family with beautifully controlled style. I read a lot of poetry. None better than Vincent O’Sullivan’s THE MOVIE MAY BE SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT, a generous collection, mixing razor-sharp wit and unflinching social comment with wry tenderness. Fiona Farrell’s THE BROKEN BOOK strikes me as one of the year’s very best. These meditations and poems about walking were metaphorically torn apart, even as they were being written, by the Christchurch earthquakes. I found them profound and deeply moving. Further afield, I’ve just read Joan Didion’s BLUE NIGHTS. It’s too full of raw grief about the death of her daughter, Quintana, for me to suggest it as a stocking filler. All the same, I’m glad I read it. I was pleased, too, to have read Man Booker Prize-winning novel THE SENSE OF AN ENDING by Julian Barnes. This story about an ageing man’s quest for truth by turn engrossed, puzzled and exasperated me and has proved a major discussion point with friends. After initial enthusiasm, I decided it had a phony streak.

Bill Manhire, poet and director of Victoria University of Wellington’s International Institute of Modern Letters: My favourite read in the year was HOW TO LIVE: A LIFE OF MONTAIGNE IN ONE QUESTION AND TWENTY ATTEMPTS AT AN ANSWER by Sarah Bakewell. It’s serious thinking made wonderfully accessible, without opacity or falseness of tone – a model of how to think and how to write. Then there was Glen Duncan’s THE LAST WEREWOLF, whose urbane narrator is 200 years old and on the run. It deals with shape-shifting and our inner wolves, but there are also plenty of great plot turns – enough to suggest a movie must be on the way. Nick Cave has blurbed the book as “a brutal, indignant, lunatic howl” – but it’s funnier, more mordant than that. One chapter starts: “Reader, I ate him.” I also enjoyed Jennifer Egan’s discontinuous narrative about the music industry, A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, although I didn’t find it as technically adventurous as most reviewers.  Weren’t people like Frank Moorhouse doing such switches of time, tone, mode and perspective a long time ago? Stephen Sondheim’s FINISHING THE HAT: COLLECTED LYRICS (1954-1981), WITH ATTENDANT COMMENTS, PRINCIPLES, HERESIES, GRUDGES, WHINES, AND ANECDOTES (2010) tells good stories about his own history as a writer of musicals, but is also brilliantly opinionated – and witty, and persuasive – on lyrics in general. Poets I’ve been reading with pleasure include Matthew Zapruder, Mary Ruefle and Alice Oswald – and, locally, Rachel Bush, whose brilliant new book, NICE PRETTY THINGS, has just been published.

Owen Marshall, writer and poet, released historical novel The Larnachs: Of  this year’s New Zealand fiction, I particularly enjoyed Sarah Quigley’s THE CONDUCTOR and Fiona Kidman’s THE TROUBLE WITH FIRE. Quigley’s novel is ambitious, and imbued with a persuasive conviction that the themes are significant. Closely observed, specific detail is almost always more effective than generalisation, and she shows an understanding of this, and also a scrupulous attention to language. Kidman’s stories continue to grow in subtlety without losing a deceptively easy delivery. She loves to probe the motivation of her characters, and she skilfully balances narration and dialogue in her stories. Elements of her life experience are obvious, but always in appropriate service to fiction’s purpose. My most memorable non-fiction read was FINEST YEARS: CHURCHILL AS WARLORD 1940-1945 (2009) by Max Hastings. A great deal has been written about Winston Churchill, but these 664 pages focus on his war leadership, which established him as one of the great figures of the 20th century. The book is a close, objective scrutiny worthy of the accolades it has received. Victory may excuse and disguise a multitude of discomforting truths, and there are some fascinating disclosures here, including the warring personalities among the allied leaders, but the indomitable spirit of the man cannot be denied.

Paula Morris, novelist, released Rangatira and Dark Souls (for young adults): My year’s reading is divided into two: what I was reading while I finished work on Rangatira and what I read afterwards. For Rangatira, I was busy with last-minute immersion in books I decided were absolutely essential to writing the scene at hand – like Robert Louis Stevenson’s THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT (1895) and Chiang Lee’s THE SILENT TRAVELLER IN LONDON (1938), which has a whole chapter on fog. After the manuscript was dragged from me by my impatient publisher, I could rejoin the regular reading world. Many of the books I read and enjoyed weren’t new – just new to me – like the darkly funny, often disturbing SOME HOPE trilogy (2006) by Edward St Aubyn, part of his semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose series. I’m always keen to read books by writers (rather than academics or critics) about writing, and two incredibly useful ones read this year were by playwrights: Alan Ayckbourn’s THE CRAFTY ART OF PLAYMAKING (2004) and HAMPTON ON HAMPTON (2005), a book of interviews with Christopher Hampton. The new novel I’ve recommended most this year was THE CAT’S TABLE by Michael Ondaatje, an exhilarating adventure story set during an incident-rich sea voyage in the 1950s – magic realism strikes the Love Boat.

Emma Neale, poet and novelist, released Fosterling and was named the 2012 Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago: I vowed, ridiculously, to read every local novel published this year, but couldn’t keep up: partly because I was reading aloud to a toddler, again and again (with great enjoyment) GOODNIGHT, MOON (1947) by Margaret Wise; DOWN THE BACK OF THE CHAIR (2006) by Margaret Mahy; and BAXTER BASICS: POEMS FOR CHILDREN (1979/2008) by James K Baxter. Of local books, I enjoyed Hamish Clayton’s WULF, Owen Marshall’s THE LARNACHS, Charlotte Randall’s HOKITIKA TOWN and Elizabeth Smither’s THE COMMONPLACE BOOK: A WRITER’S JOURNEY THROUGH QUOTATIONS. Yet the stand-out was Fiona Farrell’s fusion of memoir and poetry, THE BROKEN BOOK. Covering everything from rambling, to the quiet anxieties of grandparenthood, to the history of tuberculosis and the visionary rebuilding of 18^th-century Lisbon, it also documents the distress of the Christchurch earthquakes. Cogent, searching, tender, it is also deeply reassuring, even with its recognition that we are “atoms on mud” at the whim of impersonal, random forces. Fragmented by the quakes, the book itself is restorative: it helps us to believe again in human bonds. An astonishing achievement in the face of such upheaval. As we headed into elections where major parties barely mentioned pending ecological crisis, galvanizing and haunting was PROSPERITY WITHOUT GROWTH: ECONOMICS FOR A FINITE PLANET (2009) by Tim Jackson. The international fiction I remember most vividly is the lyrical and spare FOSTER (2010) by Claire Keegan: its final scene startlingly visual, kinetic and so simply spoken, yet carrying powerful psychological freight.

Sarah Quigley, novelist and poet, released her novel The Conductor: Two summers ago, I bought an old hardcover copy of THE LETTERS OF EVELYN WAUGH (1980). Waugh is at his wittiest and most direct when writing to his pal Nancy Mitford. “My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. I now dislike them all equally.” But at times his acerbity and snobbishness become overpowering – which is why, two years on, I’m still wending through the book. My fiction highlight of the year has been WHILE THE WOMEN ARE SLEEPING, a collection of short fiction by Spanish writer Javier Marías. First published in 1990, this was only translated into English last year. These stunning stories present the inexplicable and ghostly alongside the familiar and mundane: Marías is like a less kooky, more urbane Haruki Murakami. Translated by the wonderful Margaret Jull Costa, the prose is elegant and as clear as water. I’d been looking forward to Antonia Fraser’s MUST YOU GO? (2010), the much-fêted account of her life with Harold Pinter. It’s quite an achievement. Somehow Fraser manages to be simultaneously gushing and bland. In the preface, she refers to her diaries with a capital “D”: in itself a warning sign. I rarely give up on books, even unpalatable ones. But this was so sickly it was inedible.

Nalini Singh, paranormal romance writer, a regular on the New York Times bestseller list, released new novels Kiss of Snow (in her Psy-Changeling series) and Archangel’s Blade (in her Guild Hunter series): 2011 has been an eclectic reading year for me. I inhaled JD Robb’s releases, including NEW YORK TO DALLAS. Robb is a favourite author, her series one I’ve followed for a number of years – and hope to do so for many more. I also read my first Jo Nesbo thriller, and am enjoying catching up on his backlist. In terms of non-fiction, I picked up Portia De Rossi’s UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS (2010), about her battle with anorexia, and found it compelling reading. SHARDS OF HONOR (1986) by Lois McMaster Bujold was my SF/fantasy find of 2011. I’m thoroughly enjoying the Miles Vorkosigan saga. My favourite genre, of course, is romance, and I read releases by many of the authors I love, including fellow Kiwi Karina Bliss’s HERE COMES THE GROOM, a warm and deeply emotional book about two friends who fall for one another. I also discovered the witty regency-set romances of Australian author Anne Gracie. THE PERFECT RAKE (2005) is already a favourite. And Thea Harrison hooked me with her debut paranormal, DRAGON BOUND, featuring a dragon shapeshifter as the hero. I can’t wait to see what books and authors 2012 brings my way.

CK Stead, novelist, poet and critic, this year held a Bogliasco Fellowship in Italy, where he worked on a new collection of poems: Ian Wedde’s South of France cookbook thriller THE CATASTROPHE takes place over one night but with lengthy retrospects while the central character, who has got himself into a fatal situation, fails to get himself out of it. For this to be plausible, he has to be, frankly, dumb, and Wedde goes to some lengths to add interest-bearing elements (an existential angst, a cute Maori Tolaga Bay background, a powerful ex-wife called Mary Pepper) by way of compensation for his manifest weaknesses. There is also serious politics (Palestinian); and cooking. Sarah Quigley’s THE CONDUCTOR takes us through the process of rehearsing Shostakovich’s 7^th Symphony during the siege of Leningrad. One comes, slowly, to care about the pitifully anxious conductor and his shivering, hungry orchestra, and about the neurotic workaholic composer. That a major work should have been composed and performed under such appalling conditions, and as an assertion of Soviet invincibility, has something of the flavour of the band playing while the Titanic sank – except that in this case heroism triumphed. Two of the Man Booker shortlist, AD Miller’s SNOWDROPS and Julian Barnes’s THE SENSE OF AN ENDING, were alike in having first-person narrators, creating a sense of mystery, and sending you scuttling towards the end just to find out “what happened”. I was quite glad Barnes won – a fourth shortlisting with no win would have seemed cruel. But the truth is I simply didn’t believe in Barnes’s final explanation – whereas Miller’s novel (which managed to make post-Soviet Russia seem more terrible even than Quigley’s World War II Leningrad) came to its dark end with entire plausibility. We all know (don’t we?) that Philip Larkin was an impossible old curmudgeon, racist and reactionary. What a surprise then to read his LETTERS TO MONICA, impeccably edited by Anthony Thwaite, and discover that, while now and then that caricature is confirmed (mostly in bad taste, but sometimes very funny, jokes) the real man is human, kindly, intelligent, thoughtful; constantly wondering where his next poem is coming from, and where his talent for fiction has gone; full of dislikes and distress, and never able to marry Monica or to be rid of her; but likeable, funny, clever – and (by the way) one of the keenest and sharpest defenders of Katherine Mansfield ever. Finally, the new CHARLES DICKENS: A LIFE by Claire Tomalin: a great man, a truly extraordinary life, and a biographer equal to the task.

Grahame Sydney, painter and photographer, released Grahame Sydney’s Central Otago: Robert Hughes has always mattered to me, and I found his autobiographical THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW (2006) revealing; as was the Roald Dahl biography by Donald Sturrock, STORYTELLER (2010), for different reasons – the complexities of that man made life close to him no picnic. Fascinating to watch a brilliant career growing. Convinced as I am that the US is the natural home of free-range lunatics, far too many of whom do vote, Joe Bageant’s DEER HUNTING WITH JESUS: DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA’S CLASS WAR (2008) was a great discovery, and I’ve pushed it on to many friends since. A mid-year binge on the 2008 Wall Street crash had me ploughing through several of the many books available on that sordid theme: none better than Michael Lewis’s THE BIG SHORT: INSIDE THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE (2010). I also found L McDonald and P Robinson’s THE COLOSSAL FAILURE OF COMMON SENSE: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE COLLAPSE OF LEHMAN BROTHERS (2009), Andrew Ross Sorkin’s TOO BIG TO FAIL: THE INSIDE STORY OF HOW WALL STREET AND WASHINGTON FOUGHT TO SAVE THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM – AND THEMSELVES (2009) and Greg Farrell’s CRASH OF THE TITANS: GREED, HUBRIS, THE FALL OF MERRILL LYNCH, AND THE NEAR-COLLAPSE OF BANK OF AMERICA (2010) well worth the time invested. Alan Bennett is a constant (SMUT this year and UNTOLD STORIES [2005] always by my bed); I really admired Joy Cowley in her memoir NAVIGATION (2010) and laughed at Kevin Ireland’s romp in his novel DAISY CHAINS (2010). If the contemporary art world is bewildering, and you cannot believe Charles Saatchi is really God, read THE $12 MILLION STUFFED SHARK: THE CURIOUS ECONOMICS OF CONTEPORARY ART AND AUCTION HOUSES (2008) by Don Thompson. It may help, but you’ll still shake your head.

David Vann, novelist, is an American who spends part of each year in New Zealand and this year released Caribou Island, a prequel to Legend of a Suicide: I read ME AND MR BOOKER by Cory Taylor this year for Jennifer Byrne’s First Tuesday Book Club in Australia, and I loved it. A kind of Lolita from Lolita’s point of view. Elegant and controlled, wickedly funny, and ultimately about the momentum of misshapen lives. And thinking of Australian authors, I have to say I think Gail Jones is absolutely brilliant, in her writing and also in person. If you have a chance to see her at a festival, you should. Her most recent novel is FIVE BELLS. I also read Per Petterson’s OUT STEALING HORSES (2003) finally (I realise I was slow on this one), and I think it deserves all its acclaim. This book has it all: a compelling, surprising, important story, well-drawn characters, beautiful landscape description (set in Norway), reflection that has you wondering about your own life, etc. I taught a class at Victoria University of Wellington in the fall. All the faculty there are impressive, and the students are, too. I was the thesis adviser for a graduate student named Rebecca Styles, and I thought the first draft of her novel, Fathom, was terrific. I hope it will be published soon.

Peter Wells, writer and film-maker, released the biography The Hungry Heart: Journeys with William Colenso: Since I was immersed in what, at times, felt like a prairie of words as I raced to finish and edit my Colenso book, I tended to turn to the blankness of television and the happy numbness of a glass of wine rather than a book or its equivalent. However, I enjoyed during the year Jane Bowron’s OLD BUCKY AND ME: DISPATCHES FROM THE CHRISTCHURCH EARTHQUAKE for its chutzpah and humour, Edward St Aubyn’s AT LAST for its consistently extravagant overwriting, Adam Nicolson’s WHEN GOD SPOKE ENGLISH for its illumination about the great King James Bible, whose presence I mourn every time I go to an Anglican service, Martin Edmond’s DARK NIGHT: WALKING WITH McCAHON for its careful prose, and lastly Alan Hollinghurst’s THE STRANGER’S CHILD, which kept me calm and entertained while visiting a friend with terminal cancer. Can one ask more of a book?

Ian Wishart, writer, journalist and publisher, released the year’s most controversial book, Breaking Silence: The Kahui Case – Macsyna King and the Real Story of the Murder of Her Twins: It’s a sign of the times that I purchased all of my picks as ebooks, not hard copies. First up was local author Bryan Bruce, familiar to many as TV’s The Investigator. Bruce has proven excellent in attacking modern criminal cases, but his book JESUS: THE COLD CASE (2010) shows he’s sadly out of his depth and nearly 20 years out of date. In my view, he relies far too much on fringe “scholarship” like Robert Funk’s now thoroughly discredited Jesus Seminar from the mid-90s, and I ought to know because I wrote my own book on the historical facts of Jesus Christ, The Divinity Code, four years earlier, picking holes in what turned out to be his sources. I found myself reading Cold Case and going, “That’s been debunked, that’s out of date, why aren’t you up with modern scholarship?” Second for me is James Delingpole’s WATERMELONS: THE GREEN MOVEMENT’S TRUE COLOURS. Delingpole is an excellent and witty writer and columnist for the UK papers, and Watermelons is a perfect summer ebook read if you want to find out the real agenda behind climate change policy. Third is Donna Laframboise’s THE DELINQUENT TEENAGER WHO WAS MISTAKEN FOR THE WORLD’S TOP CLIMATE EXPERT, which is a merciless take-no-prisoners attack on the scientific credibility of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If you are a global warming believer who trusts the IPCC, you won’t be after reading this. Go ahead, I dare you. Feel the fear and read it anyway.