Well-known New Zealanders pick their holiday reads

By MARGIE THOMSON deputy books editor

Author Peter Wells is a founder of the Auckland Writers Festival.

"I'm looking forward to reading Mike Davis' Magical Urbanism. Davis is an iconoclast about cities, who believes you can 'read' a city as you read a book. He writes about LA but it could be Auckland.

"I started reading my friend Stephanie Johnson's new novel Belief in the midst of a million things, and then realised I needed to set time aside to be swept away by this book. And I also choose Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, six short stories of Indians in exile which won the Pulitzer Prize 2000."

Michael King's biography of Janet Frame, Wrestling With The Angel, was published this year. He is about to leave New Zealand for a few months to teach for a semester at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

"For my birthday, I was given Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin and Richard Holmes' Sidetracks, Explorations of a Romantic Biographer, both of which I look forward to reading while travelling.

"I am also keen to get hold of the new Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer, because I thought that The Poisonwood Bible was so outstandingly good."

Stephanie Johnson's novel Belief was published in November. Johnson was this year's recipient of the Katherine Mansfield fellowship and has recently returned from Menton. She is a founder of the Auckland Writers Festival.

"This sounds dreadful, but I'm reading the Enigma of Suicide and Suicide and Mental Health in Australia and New Zealand. It's research for the new novel I'm working on, but I am reading other things for light relief. Most of my other reading is in preparation for the Auckland Writers Festival. I'm reading Delia Falconer's The Service of Clouds, a first novel by a young Australian who is very hot at the moment. It's set in the Blue Mountains in 1907.

"And I'm also reading When Elephants Weep: the emotional lives of animals by Jeffrey Masson, a Californian writer living in New Zealand."

Michael Neill is professor of English at the University of Auckland, and a well-known Shakespearean expert.

While his holiday choices do not directly pertain to his academic work, he says: "I do not know what is not related to my academic work. All sorts of things turn out to be at a tangent to my work.

"I am looking forward to reading Witi Ihimaera's The Uncle's Story, as well as Isabel Allende's latest novel, Daughter of Fortune and Kapka Kasabova's Love in the Land of Midas.

"Ciaran Carson is an Irish poet and musician, and his book Last Night's Fun is about Irish music, an account of his own experience playing music. I teach Irish literature and politics and I'm always trying to explain to students that the best way of understanding Irish politics is by listening to the music.

"I'm going to read Jane Kelsey's The New Zealand Experiment, a book I should have read years ago. And someone has given me a copy of Claude Wolfe and Kip Lornell's Life and Legend of Leadbelly."

Michele Boag is a businesswoman and a candidate for the National Party presidency.

"Thrillers and murders are what I love. I don't know why, I just do. I devour anything by Carl Hiassen or Janet Ivanovich or Elizabeth George.

"But what I've got to read this holiday is The Shape of Snakes by Minette Walters, The Lion's Game by Nelson de Mille which is a kind of terrorist thriller, and the latest Patricia Cornwall, The Last Precinct."

Bob Harvey is Mayor of Waitakere City and former president of the Labour Party.

"What I'm reading over the holidays is the Dinosaur Hunters by Deborah Cadbury. Victorian treachery and obsession with the finding of the first fossil. It's a ripping read.

"Mavericks by Matt Warshaw is a history of riding the biggest waves in the world. Scary, magnificent stuff.

"Between Heaven and Hell, the enthralling life of the climber of the Southern Alps and the first women on Mt Cook, Freda Du Faur, a towering tragic feminist who was never appreciated for her courage and ability. Finally I must read Confessions of a Lapsed Standard Bearer by Andrei Makine, a bleak glimpse of the Russian communist world through a teenager's eyes."