New Zealand's great and good tell Iain Sharp about their favorite books of 2005--and what they'll be reading on the beach this summer.

Michael Hurst
Actor and theatre director

SUMMER READS: I am most looking forward to reading Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson.  He wrote A Terrible Beauty, a history of the 20th century in terms of ideas rather than dates and events, which I found to be absolutely fantastic.  Ideas looks even more gripping.  It's an epic sweep over the past, full of insight and erudition, and a way of seeing how we are all in this together.  I can't wait.

Second on the list is Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and then I am thinking of revisiting some Robert Graves--Count Belisarius to be precise.  There's also Stephen King's Song of Susannah, the penultimate volume in his absolutely out-there fantasy series The Dark Tower.  I have been dipping into this sequence of books for the past year or so.  I find them compelling in a weird, almost perverse kind of way.  They appeal to my dark side, which contrasts well with lying on the beach . . .