Choice holiday reading

Summer is my idea of reading hell. You can't read a book on the beach. Actually, I'm never quite sure what beaches are good for beyond somewhere to eat an ice cream, in the summer; or walking, in the winter. I like the idea of walking on a beach in winter but the truth is I'm far too busy: bundled up in the bed, with a good book and a cat.

And I don't go to the beach in the summer because I'd rather have sand in my sandwiches than in my pages and, anyway, try reading in the sun and the words start fox-trotting drunkenly in the glare and some mad dog will run by shaking its tail and splattering your pages with pongy doggy-scented seawater. So here I am in the garden, in book-reading heaven, on New Year's Day.

The neighbours are all (hopefully) at the beach so they won't be out playing with the new weed-eater they got for Christmas. I've dragged down one of the heavy old wooden deckchairs we bought for our Christmas years ago and neglected to paint (too busy reading) and put it, and its companion table, under the shaggy shade of the old lichen-covered plum tree.

From here I can look up from the pages and see the bit of the garden that doesn't look too neglected. The hostas are nice this year and the day lilies are blooming. Behind me is the bit of the garden I don't look at. It's a weed patch we keep intending to do something with. (Too busy reading.)

But I might go and attack a weed or two once I've finished reading the book on the top of the stack on the table, next to the bowl of pistachios and the glass of gin and tonic with a slice of lime (the bottles are in the ice bucket; I can't be doing with long walks to the kitchen — too busy reading).

The book on top is This Piece of Earth: A Life in My New Zealand Garden by Harvey McQueen and it has everything I could desire in a book: a garden, cooking (with recipes) and cats. McQueen was a teacher who became an inspector who became education adviser to David Lange and his memoir is the most charming book I have read in a long time. It is a quiet book, in the way that gardening and cooking and living with cats are contemplative activities: you make peace with the weeds and the plants that curl up their toes and the cats that dig up your seedlings and eat the birds that you planted the garden to attract.

A beautifully paced book which captures perfectly a year in a garden or an afternoon spent pottering in the kitchen cooking for people you love. It is a memoir of many friendships, especially that of McQueen with his wife Anne Else and the friends who wander through their kitchen, garden and their lives.

Another memoir of friendship on the pile is Truth & Beauty, by Ann Patchett (author of Bel Canto). This is the story of Patchett's long friendship with fellow writer Lucy Grealy, who wrote her own memoir Autobiography of a Face, in which she told the story of the endless attempts to reconstruct her face after the damage caused by childhood cancer. This is a remarkably frank reconstruction of a difficult friendship.

Lucy was a demanding friend: clingy, needy and she became a heroin addict. She was also a delight. And then she died. Patchett writes of a dream in which she tells Lucy that she is writing a book "about you being dead". She writes "I feel embarrassed somehow, as if this proves I had lost faith in her ability to still be alive." Touching, harrowing, at times hard to read.

I intend to re-read C.K. Stead's Mansfield this summer. It came out last year and was easily a highlight of my reading year. Some critics said they thought Stead had failed to bring Mansfield to life. Oh, piffle. This book changed the way I thought of Mansfield because it did exactly the opposite. She is now — and will remain — real in all of her (here, fictionalised) foibles and struggles and bitchy asides.

Somewhere along the reading way I forgot to read Madame Bovary so I am very grateful to Clive James whose recent piece on aldaily.com (from the Atlantic Monthly) began: "The first thing to say about Madame Bovary is that it's a terrific story Everyone should read it. Everyone would read it, given a free taste. The plot fairly belts along from the first page." He's absolutely right: it's a ripper.

But goodness, doesn't all this reading (especially all this reading about McQueen's love of cooking) make you hungry?

I'm not so much reading, or not yet, as admiring Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion, which I greedily demanded for my Christmas. Do I need another cookbook? Like I need another book. They get up at night and take over the house. But this is an irresistibly gorgeous thing with its silver-edged pages, its stripey cover and orange and silver marker ribbons. Oh look, the page has fallen open to ham and pistachio mousse. I think there's some Xmas ham left and I suppose I could spare a few of my nuts and I don't think I'm so pissed as to be rendered incapable of whipping an egg white or two.

But hang on. There is still a stack of copies of the Spectator to flick through, sent by my grandmother in Wanganui. We have a deal: she sends me the Spectator and I send her hardly used thrillers. She shares the scary books around her retirement village and the old ladies say: "Doesn't your granddaughter read any nice books?"

They would probably enjoy This Piece of Earth. It is a very nice book for reading in a garden. But bugger them, they can buy their own copy.

* Michele Hewitson is the acting books editor