Linda Herrick: Recommended holiday reads

If I could only retrieve my copy of The Insider, the titillating diary-memoir by former Daily Express editor Piers Morgan, it would head my list of must-reads this summer. But it's gone. Over the past week or two I've been taunted by a colleague who nicked it — she claims I lent it to her — and now her damn boyfriend's reading it and has told me, via her, that he will not give it back.

So clearly it's addictive, crammed full of acutely observed tittle-tattle about London celebs, politicians and lowlifes. Morgan seems to have known everyone — and after reading this, you will never watch Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson in the same light again. But why? I may have to buy another copy.

Speaking of acute observation, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is also on the summer list. The news it's to be made into a British television series next year has been a prod to buy it (the Penguin Classics edition costs less than $10). Northanger Abbey follows the alleged adventures of 17-year-old Catherine Moreland, whose addiction to the gothic purple prose of the likes of Mrs Radcliffe hyper-colours her view of the small world of Bath. It is said to be highly comical and Austen's deliciously sly, precise writing is something to savour.

Austen despised humbug so I'm sure she would thoroughly approve of the new Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words (Random House, $27.95), an attack on forms of linguistic abuse we increasingly hear from the mouths of politicians and management mongrels. You know, meaningless phrases such as assessment regime, compassionate conservatism, goals matrix, learning coherence. And now we're hearing words such as "rendition of terrorism suspects". It's just so not "on message".

Robert Fisk is on message, loud and long. Started in spring, finished in summer — at time of writing, I'm only up to page 600-something, just over the halfway mark, of Fisk's Great War For Civilisation and struggling to process a fraction of the information he's crammed in. But having come so far, it would rude to let him down — and the people he's writing about so passionately — and give it up for lighter fare.

It's relentless stuff, the history of the Middle East over the past century, as told by Fisk. At some stage, perhaps about 300 pages ago, "Fisky" — as his mates call him — warns that a slightly black comical anecdote will be the last and from here on in it's all tragedy. He's right. Every page is a dense piece of instruction but I'm determined to keep going ... then I can turn to The Insider — another school of journalism altogether, one which Fisky would despise.

For pure fictional pleasure, mixed with heartache and laughter, British poet Gerard Woodward's outstanding novel, I'll Go To Bed At Noon, was one of the year's best, one I'd gladly read again. It's a funny study of the wrecking impact of booze; the travails of the Jones family in 70s London are thought to be based on Woodward's family and the book is dedicated to the memory of his brother Francis.

But it wasn't till I'd finished I'll Go To Bed At Noon, released in paperback earlier this year, that I found it was actually the sequel to an earlier work, August, in which the much younger, slightly less damaged Jones family seeks solace in an annual holiday in Wales. As it's available on limited release here, my summer edition of August will be ordered at my favourite bookshop or via Amazon.co.uk

After many years of expensively haphazard gardening, I'm starting to get slightly better at it and have been particularly inspired this year by books like Alan Titchmarsh's How to Be a Gardener. But that's English, so for a good sense guide I'm going to be referring to Sue Linn's advice laid out so clearly in Real Gardening Real Easy: A Practical Guide for All New Zealand Gardens.

The trouble is, there are so many temptations cutting into weekend gardening time — like reading books about plants. The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants, by Anna Pavord, is a new release by the Independent's gardening writer and a stunningly beautiful history of mankind's obsession with plant identification and cataloguing. It is so engrossing, and illustrated with the most divine watercolours drawn through the ages.

But one of the other great pleasures of being in the garden is looking at the birds. My cat is certainly a dedicated vigilante. What a pity she can't take the more pacifist path of poring over The Bedside Book of Birds by Graeme Gibson, another new arrival and homage to the feathered creatures of the air. The writings are a superb collection of poems, letters and essays, and quite simply the most extraordinary drawings and paintings of birds I've seen in a book for some time. It even includes some species you may see in your garden this summer.

* Linda Herrick is the canvas magazine books editor.