Giving made easy

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."

Michele Hewitson found herself unexpectedly seduced by The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra (William Heinemann, $34.95). Set in Afghanistan in the time of the Taleban, she called it "a beautiful, brutal novel about the death of love, of a country".

Plenty of new New Zealand fiction impressed our reviewers. John McCrystal wrote of Lloyd Jones' Paint Your Wife (Penguin, $35) that it was "intriguing, elusive. A book about the difference between superficial appearance and underlying reality — every stroke [Jones] makes is deft and sure".

Nigel Cox's Tarzan Presley (VUP, $29.95) got David Larsen excited. There is a boy (Tarzan) raised by gorillas in the Wairarapa (Tarzan), then adopted by the Presley family. You have to read it, Larsen said so: "That thunder you hear is the drumming of 100,000 feet, racing to the nearest book store to pick up one of the most interesting novels of the year. You should join them."

Patricia Grace's Tu (Penguin, $35), the story of a member of the Maori Battalion in Italy, was, said Susan Jacobs, "told with heart and humanity". She also liked Stephanie Johnson's Music from a Distant Room (Random House, $26.94) the story of the mysterious death of a gifted pianist, "which explores the creative power of memory ... the shock of random events.".

Of Charlotte Randall's What Happen Then, Mr Bones (Penguin, $28) tracing the dubious fortunes of the Montague family, Jacobs wrote that Randall "is one of the most original, intelligent and exciting voices in contemporary New Zealand literature".

The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary, edited by Tony Deverson and Graeme Kennedy (Oxford University Press, $110) would make an impressive present: weighty but lively, Gordon McLauchlan called it "expansive, balanced and sensible".

He found this tome to be "up-to-date, inclusive, with a nice balance between scholarship and accessibility, and without too stern an attitude towards what it considers marginally improper use". It'll make you look a brainy, and generous, gift-giver too.

Lynn Truss' surprise hot-seller, Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (Profile, $35) an ode to the correct use of the apostrophe, won't set you back quite as much but will be as eagerly received by the sticklers in your life. Peter Calder, while pointing out that that subtitle contains a glaring error (where's the hyphen?) found this "a generally delightful read ... buy it for a stickler you love. Then, if you're not a stickler, borrow it and read it".

In July, at the Montana Book Awards, Anne Salmond won the Montana overall non-fiction and the history award for her wonderful history/adventure true tale, Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (Allen Lane, $59.95). That riveting, rollicking book was published in 2003, but as a result of the award, it remains high up on the canvas list of recommended books for Christmas.

As does the late Michael King's The Penguin History of New Zealand (Penguin $59.95) also published last year, and winner of the Readers' Choice award at the Montana.

His death cast a pall over the literary year — all those books he was never to write — but the Penguin History is still on the best-seller lists: sales of King's history have now topped 150,000. An author can have no greater legacy.