Recommended holiday reads: Janet McAllister

I have an unhealthy consumer compulsion: I buy books faster than I read them. They pile up in my room, collecting dust and guilt, while I'm out being tempted by yet more book sales. Maybe I'll be able to catch up during the holidays ...

Top of my list this year is Life Stories: Profiles from the New Yorker, which I've already dipped into with promising results.

Best so far: a poignant but unsentimental history of dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov written in 1998, and a humorous and quietly indignant 1992 account of the plight of brothers Gregory and David Chudnovsky, mathematical geniuses who built a supercomputer in their low-rent apartment with mail order parts.

And even though, unlike those men, she's not a USSR emigre, Miami Herald crime reporter Edna Buchanan manages to fascinate in a 1986 profile. I can't decide whether her method of dealing with victims' media-shy families should be taught in journalism schools or whether it's a good thing she's probably the only person tough enough to use it.

In spite of the guilt-inducing unread piles, Life Stories has also inspired me to reread The Bullfighter Checks Her Make-up, a collection of imaginatively-crafted profiles written by Susan Orlean, whose book The Orchid Thief screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann grappled with for the film Adaptation.

Another recent journalistic purchase is Alistair Cooke's collected Letters from America — I can hear his slow, measured, mid-Atlantic accent in my head as I'm reading it, although the 95-year-old quaver in the voice I remember is a bit out of place for his 1940s letters (it's like the 1998 Billy Idol playing his 1980s self in The Wedding Singer).

Also good for dipping into is an old favourite, Ex Libris, a collection of witty essays about books by likeable Anne Fadiman. That may sound like the literary world eating itself — at the time of the book's publication, Fadiman was editor of literary journal The American Scholar — but the musings of the self-confessed nerd are the antithesis of high falutin introspection.

Her tales of proof-reading menus and talking plagiarism with her husband George in between unloading the dishwasher and watching ER are funny and accessible.

Although I'm obviously a victim of the current trend for non-fiction — basically because you have a better idea before you start reading it whether you'll be interested or not, whereas fiction is riskier — I also think I'll unfashionably escape with some magic realism via The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.

A few weeks ago, I picked it up at a friend's place and couldn't put it down until long after it was impolite to keep reading it. After two chapters, I'm still not sure exactly what's going on, but the writing is so assured I have complete confidence this is a deliberate tactic. And that comfortable feeling allows me to settle back and enjoy the scenery.


* Janet McAllister is a canvas writer