Art books: sumptuous publications to strain your wallet and your shelves
Published: 09 December 2007
The most beautiful book of the year is undoubtedly Klimt, edited by Alfred Weidinger (Prestel £89) with texts by several other Klimt scholars and including a catalogue raisonné of his 253 known paintings, several of which are shown here for the first time. There are also many supporting biographical photographs and reproductions of works by artists influenced by him and those by whom he was influenced, including William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Frederick Leighton and Whistler. The format is vast and the reproductions glitter with Klimt's characteristic obsession with gold paint.
Audio books: lend an ear to the best novels and non-fiction
Published: 09 December 2007
There are dozens of books to delight the ear this Christmas. The very best is Marina Lewycka's Two Caravans (Penguin £12.99). Stumbling through a murky hinterland of bewildered migrant workers and terrifying people-traffickers this rambling, picaresque, funny, angry novel accelerates into an irresistible love story. Alone at the microphone, the stupendous Sian Thomas becomes an enormous international cast of every age, sex and temperament. Don't read it: listen to it. Staying with modern fiction, Julie Walters reads her own first novel, Maggie's Tree (Orion £14.99), with, as you'd expect, a buttonholing eagerness. It is about four maladjusted friends having an improbable number of near-fatal adventures in a snow-bound New York. Dorothy Koomson's Marshmallows for Breakfast (Hachette £13.99) is a similarly messy and modern take on dysfunctional marriage, alcoholism, rape, you name it. The happyish ending is rendered more moving than sentimental by Adjoah Andoh's sensitive reading.
Coffee-table books: Colourful, grand and with gloomth galore
Published: 09 December 2007
In 1555, the Italian nobleman, lover, soldier and scholar Vicino Orsini retired to his country estate at Bomarzo in Lazio. Sickened with the world of the court, he sought solace in his boschetto, no "little wood" but a sculpture garden offering thrills, surprises, intellectual delights and philosophical consolation. Without a grounding in the works of Ficino, Dante, Petrarch and Tasso and a thorough understanding of Renaissance emblems, it's impossible now to unpick the multiple meanings of his sacro bosco (sacred wood). Jessie Sheeler's The Garden at Bomarzo: A Renaissance riddle (Frances Lincoln £25) guides the reader step-by-step round what remains of Vicino's grand plan, with its stony orcs, dragons and sirens, its winged horses, elephants and tortoises, its temples, dried up fountains and puzzling inscriptions. Sheeler's previous book unravelled the ideas behind Little Sparta, Ian Hamilton Finlay's Scottish garden, but Bomarzo is much more complex, and in its current ruinous state difficult to interpret. Mark Edward Smith's stunning photographs make this the pick of the coffee-table books this Christmas.
Food books: it's exhausting enough cooking the dinner, without having to hunt and kill it too
Published: 09 December 2007
I think I need to buy a gun. Not because, as Agatha Christie pointed out, Christmas is the time when more family murders take place than any other, though she was no doubt right. It's because I'm starting to feel inadequate as a cook without one. These days it's not enough to eat squirrel and pigeon. It's not even enough to know how to gut, pluck and skin them. The self-respecting foodie has to go out and slaughter them, too. There's a whole clutch of books this year encouraging readers to do it yourself. Grow your own veg. Catch your own fish. Raise your own meat. Live off the land.
Gardening books: This year's crop aren't worth getting your hands dirty for
Published: 09 December 2007
The Christmas gardening book is a reliable sight at this time of year, with shelves at Waterstone's groaning from the weight of the harvest. They may be pretty to look at, but beware. Many of the most instantly attractive items won't outlast the festive season. The blandest tastes often come inside the prettiest outer foliage, and what looks like a good present on Christmas Day will often lie unread after New Year. Pretty covers and hefty pricetags are no indication of worth.
Humour books: is this what passes for comedy these days?
Published: 09 December 2007
This is traditionally the time of year when it's better to receive than to give, and this applies to publishers more than anyone else, as they churn out warehouses full of supposedly humorous crap which is designed to be bought as presents for people who won't read it. But this tide of tosh also subsidises many publishers' output for the rest of the year. If you look at it like that, you can almost forgive them, knowing that each copy of some cynical cut '*' paste telly tie-in will help another, better book live.
Military books: tales of heroism and horror to entice the non-reading male this Christmas
Published: 09 December 2007
When publishers want the great unreading male public to pick up a book at Christmas time, they send for the SAS. This year, The Regiment: The real story of the SAS, by Michael Asher (Viking £20) recounts the history of the men in black and dwells on the darker side of the popular heroes. By now, the unit must be the world's least secret organisation. As one veteran complained, after the televised success of the Iranian Embassy siege: "We were turned into a performing circus, demonstrating our techniques to any interested member of the Royal family and their corgis. Our standards dropped appallingly."
Cover Stories: PFD-United Agents Ltd saga; author Sarah Hall; lovereading.co.uk
Published: 07 December 2007
* The PFD-United Agents Ltd saga continues – enlivened last month by a rumour that Caroline Michel had resigned, which the embattled MD was quick to refute. Then David Buchler, the so-called turnaround king at PFD's parent CSS Stellar, announced the registration of a new company called United Agents Group – a petty move. But there is discomfort elsewhere in the once-sedate world of literary agenting: Christopher Little, agent to JK Rowling (above), is parting company with Patrick Janson-Smith, who joined his agency two years ago from Transworld as heir-apparent. Patrick Walsh, who had been Little's right hand, left the agency in similarly unclear circumstances in the late Nineties and has since made a successful career at Conville & Walsh. But Janson-Smith is in his late fifties, and may be tempted away from starting on his own: agents agree it takes some five years to establish a money-making client list. Perhaps Michel will offer him a job – PJS joins PFD?
Interview: How Catherine O'Flynn became a contender for the year's grandest prizes
Published: 07 December 2007
Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books
Published: 07 December 2007
Most people return from a short trip to the Gulf laden with sparkling goodies from the bling-filled malls; I came back with two books that I can't begin to read (although I can just about follow the page numbers). All the same, I think that I picked up a far more enduring treasure: the first Arabic-language editions, handsomely bound, of works by Jürgen Habermas (The Future of Human Nature) and Stephen Hawking (A Briefer History of Time). They were among the inaugural tasters for an initiative that, in its scope and reach, makes the logistics of speed-of-light travel look like a stroll in the park.
The Loser, By Fatos Kongoli, trans. Robert Elsie & Janice Mathie-Heck
Published: 06 December 2007
Girls (and boys) aloud: the best audiobooks
Published: 02 December 2007
Neither book nor DVD, audiobooks tend to be despised as gifts. Yet they are much more than an effortless way out of reading aloud to the young or instructing the adolescent. They are ways of turning the kind of long winter journeys we all undertake over Christmas into a pleasure, superimposing the landscape of imagination over the dreary or ugly reality.
Yo ho ho and a bottle of blood: thrilling books for boys
Published: 02 December 2007
Snakehead by Anthony Horowitz (Walker Books £12.99). Alex Rider, black belt in karate, fluent in three languages, teenage MI6 agent, has just fallen from space into the sea. The Australian Secret Service rescues him from his little ship, and takes him back to their base. After studying his files, they want him to work for them. Alex refuses and goes to a barbecue. But then he gets lost and steps on a bomb and is told later it was a test. He decides to work for them after all. Their aim: to stop Scorpia, a group of people who appeared in a previous book, who intend to destroy the Reef Conference – celebrities wanting to make poverty history – by making a tsunami engulf the island on which the conference is being held.
The best of the season's picture books
Published: 02 December 2007
Children's picture books don't entertain unhappy endings. Life, sadly, doesn't follow suit: 2007 began on a very bad note for those of us who love to hang out, looking woefully oversized, in the smallies' section of the bookshop. January saw the early death of one of the finest author/illustrators ever to put ink-pen and colourwash to paper, Harry Horse. By way of a small consolation, Puffin has just published his last book, Little Rabbit's Christmas (hardback £12.99; paperback £5.99). This, the fifth in the series, is every inch as tender and as lovely as all the others. Little Rabbit wants a red sledge to call his own. With the help of his friends, he averts catastrophe and learns to share. It's just what every stocking needs (do please try not to sob too hard).
A life in pictures: How Truffaut and Vigo inspired author Brian Selznick
Published: 02 December 2007
Britain's rudest road signs
Published: 01 December 2007
Christmas book special: Our critics choose this year's best reads
Published: 30 November 2007
Food: Feasts found in the east
Published: 30 November 2007
Unless you are the type who likes to knock up a plate of pressed foie gras with Sauternes and camomile jelly for a late-night snack, you are unlikely to find a practical application for Gordon Ramsay's modestly titled Three-Star Chef (Quadrille, £40). It is hardcore gastro-porn. The lavishness of the production, which includes 14 pages devoted to portraits of the author, contrasts oddly with Ramsay's salty lingo. If ever deprived of his stellar awards, we learn he will "work his bollocks off" to ensure their return.
History: Tales of the imperial city
Published: 30 November 2007
Historians may well come to see 2007 as the year when all the febrile post-Cold War, post-September 11 debate about a "new American empire" peaked and began to subside. Both the global dreams and the local power of the US neocons falter and fade; calls for a rapid exit strategy from Iraq become more strident; allies – from Tony Blair to Australia's John Howard – are toppled; and warning signs of instability and underlying weakness in the US economy accumulate. If there has been an early 21st-century "imperial moment", it looks increasingly possible that it will prove to have been momentary indeed.
Music: Unchained melodies and rhapsodies in blue
Published: 30 November 2007
For virtually all of us, music has great power, whether or not we seek it out," Oliver Sacks observes in Musicophilia (Picador, £17.99), a thought-provoking opus for anyone curious as to how we "perceive" music, how we "construct" it, even how we "imagine" it. Sacks takes us on a remarkable journey, showing the effects of music on patients suffering from Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, and how neurological events awaken the musician within.
Nature: A good year for the roses... and beeches, and rooks
Published: 30 November 2007
It has been a vintage year for nature writing after a period when the nature shelves in British bookshops were becoming reduced to field guides and television spin-offs. Words, you might say, had become the servants of the picture. Yet this year has produced a quartet of nature books that depend on the pictures that form in the mind's eye. Each is an exploration of what wildness – or naturalness – actually means. They also take an original and often inspired look at what one author calls the "glorious commonplaces" all around us.
Performance: Clever girls and naughty boys
Published: 30 November 2007
Ned Sherrin's death in October robbed the stage of one of its most avuncular chroniclers. His delight in all things theatrical can be savoured again in a new edition of his anecdotes, Voices From the Wings (J R Books £16.99). Barbed compliments and bitchy retorts abound, my favourites being Alan Jay Lerner's reply when Andrew Lloyd Webber asked why people took an instant dislike to him ("It saves time"), and the playwright Charlie MacArthur's desire to punish the gay critic who had savaged his actress wife, Helen Hayes, by "sending him a poisoned choirboy".
Poetry: The charge of the light brigade
Published: 30 November 2007
This poem" says Sophie Hannah in "Letterland", "is about language itself./ It uses words in the way it uses words/ to demonstrate how those words might be used... I think," she concludes, "it's about feeling inadequate/ in highly charged emotional situations." Her pithy update of Coleridge's dictum about poetry, in this witty parody, might serve as a snapshot of much of contemporary poetry. But, luckily, not all of it. This year has offered rich pickings – and the poems in her wonderfully witty new collection, Pessimism for Beginners (Carcanet, £8.95), are among the richest.
Real lives: From navel gazing to belly-button rings
Published: 30 November 2007
In a radio chat show at the end of May, a conversation took place that could have been written to illustrate the difference between a worthwhile memoir and a really, really bad one. The New York author Ishmael Beah talked with charm and eloquence about his childhood in Sierra Leone: his flight from rebel soldiers aged 12; the village he saw burned when he was 13; his life as a child soldier, drugged, terrified and forced to kill. Then the interviewer turned to a faded rock star, who was there to discuss his own memoir. "I never wanted to be famous," he whined. "I had to go through a lot of therapy."
Romps and romances: Spooky joys with Brenda, bride of Frankenstein
Published: 30 November 2007
Sexing up romance is the job of every good popular novelist, and this year's more memorable offerings have taken on a decidedly gothic bent. With earth-bound thrills in short supply, expect your stocking to come filled with tales of supernatural smooching and phantasmagorical flings. Set in a wintery Paris, Julie Myerson's erotic ghost story The Story of You (Vintage, £7.99) describes a dreamy affair between a bereaved mother and an enigmatic lover. As her grief starts to recede, so too does her man. Liaisons of an existential kind also lie at the heart of Douglas Kennedy's noirish thriller, The Woman in the Fifth (Hutchinson £12.99). On the run from the authorities and a failed marriage, Paris-based academic Harry Ricks hooks up with a mysterious older woman. Their trysts couldn't be more terrestrial, but Harry soon starts to wonder if his mistress has a pulse.
