Picture / Kenny Rodger

Picture / Kenny Rodger

We don’t know why people get in such a lather about Christmas shopping: just go to a bookshop.

To make it even easier, we've gone Christmas shopping for you, with a selection of the books our reviewers loved in 2004.

Susan Jacobs found The Polished Hoe by Austin Clarke, (Harper Collins, $34.99) "a powerful, engrossing, passionate and lyrical" fictional account of exploitation and sadistic violence in a sugar plantation in Barbados. Just the thing for Christmas.

As is Joyce Carol Oates’ The Tattooed Girl (Harper Collins, $24.99) which Linda Herrick called "a compelling, forcefully told portrait ... of two fantastically odd but authentic characters".

A flick through our books pages shows, that our love affair with the memoir continues. Sorry, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, by Peter Bland (Vintage, $24.95) is a poet’s memoir and Penelope Bieder is eagerly awaiting the next instalment. It is the story of Bland’s long, restless love affair with New Zealand.

One of the delightful surprises of the year was choreographer Douglas Wright’s beautifully wrought memoir Ghost Dance (Penguin, $39.95).

"Articulating in words now, instead of flying bodies ... his exploration of concepts and worlds just beyond our usual vision," said Bernadette Rae.

And Michael Larsen wrote of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, a memoir of addiction (John Murray, $27.99): "This is one of the most harrowing, visceral, astounding and moving books you are likely to read this, or any other year."

Linda Herrick loved When You Lunch with the Emperor, by Ludwig Bemelmans (Random House, $27.95). Bemelmans wrote and drew, the much-loved children’s classics, the Madeline series. Of this series of semi-autobiographical essays, Herrick wrote, "it is an enthralling experience to travel through his life with him".

Margie Thomson couldn’t decide whether Fiona Farrell’s Book Book (Vintage, $26.95) was memoir or novel but she enjoyed it as it traced a 1950s childhood in Oamaru through to the character-forging OE. This, said Thomson, "is a lovely book, literary and bookish yet totally accessible".

Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (Jonathan Cape, $54.95) a novel posing as memoir, intrigued too. Hewitson found it "lovingly remembered; written with an engaging and engrossing affection".

Michael Larsen was fascinated by a bunch of eccentric North American birdspotters in The Big Year, by Mark Obmascik (Random House, $37.95). "A fantastic surprise."