RNZ: The NEW Torchlight List

It's Jim's final countdown and he rates the authors from the very best, through to those he wants to read more of, promising authors, those not quite good enough, the unpromising - and the just plain awful. He tells Wallace he still loves reading - but he won't do another book like this again: "When you are recommended 400 books you often encounter an author like Knausgard who has been much hailed but you can't damn him without reading about four of his books. So you've read one book and you absolutely hate it and he kills your pleasure in reading for the next fortnight because you now have to go on reading four horrible books and I don't think I could put myself through that again."

This chapter of The New Torchlight List takes in a big geographical area and a variety of cultures.

Jim agrees with Wallace's love for Disgrace, by South African writer J.M. Coetzee - though Jim says Coetzee's "not brilliant". He describes the Cairo trilogy by Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz as "a landmark work". Jim recommends Somalian writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali "for an unparalleled insight into what Islam means for those who interpret the Koran literally". She was subjected to female circumcision at the age of five and over the years turned away from Islam. Jim tells Wallace about the value of entering another culture in a novel: "You only know what human nature is capable of if you read what's happened to it in a variety of societies."

Jim Flynn and Wallace Chapman discuss Australasian literature. Wallace takes on Jim over Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries - too long, says Jim. Not so, says Wallace. Jim says Catton can write but she needs to get her talent under control - "too much good material". He says Janet Frame also can write "but a lot of it is spoiled by schoolgirl emotive prose". Among Australian writers Jim rates Thomas Keneally with Schindler's Ark, Peter Carey and Hannah Kent - a writer with an impressive first novel, Burial Rites, that has won nine literary awards. "Watch for Kent's next novel."

Jim Flynn tells Wallace Chapman that Italian Umberto Eco's best work is The Name of the Rose but this comes with a warning as Eco "loves to demonstrate his learning. The plot is interrupted by long essays which interest me because I teach medieval theology ..." Of best-selling Norwegian author Jo Nesbo, Jim assures Wallace that he doesn't hate him - "but he's not as good as Stieg Larsson". Later in his book, The New Torchlight List, Jim places Larsson in a list of three "awful" writers. Also on Jim's "awful" list is a writer called a "titan of modern literature" by The New Yorker, Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgard. Where, he asks, do they find these critics?

Jim Flynn and Wallace Chapman discuss modern Irish literature. Jim rates John Banville's "wonderful style", but is less enamoured with John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The sex in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls (which was banned in Ireland in 1960) he deems "incredibly tame stuff".

Some of Jim's favourite writers feature in this episode - V.S. Naipaul and Kazuo Ishiguro who, he says, is "perhaps the greatest novelist of our generation. His work is going to make him one of few novelists writing today who will be read throughout this century." Jim also rates Hilary Mantel's novels about Thomas Cromwell: "She captures Henry the eighth who is really a gigantic baby." Jim and Wallace heartily disagree over A.S.Byatt and Jim surprises Wallace by recommending Ruth Rendell - "I don't despise people just because they write in the detective genre."

Jim and Wallace discuss South American writers, including the politics and the passion reflected in the great writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez - recommending the memorable Love in the Time of Cholera but urging readers to avoid The Autumn of the Patriarch at all costs. This book, written in one paragraph is, Jim says, "really terrible". Jim also reveals his attitude to magic realism: "I'm dead against it when it takes over. When someone disappears in a puff of smoke when they could just have easily been run over by a truck."

Jim Flynn discusses North American authors and tells Wallace Chapman that everyone must read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. He also highly rates Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, but Wallace and Jim agree that Don DeLillo's Underworld, which received "extravagant praise", isn't really up to snuff. As Jim says: "It is hard to write the great American novel when you are trying to write the great American novel."

Jim Flynn is a world expert on human intelligence, and the author of many ground-breaking books on intelligence, philosophy and politics. He came from a poor family and owes all his success to reading great books. So the Emeritus Professor of Politics at Otago University was disturbed to find that fewer and fewer adults and young people are reading for pleasure. Reading, he says, sharpens the mind helps us understand the world. Many are willing to try books recommended to them, so Jim Flynn read and rated 400 books, mostly written by modern novelists - his findings are published in The New Torchlight List  - In Search of the Best Modern Authors. In this series, Wallace quizzes Jim Flynn on his picks and takes him to task - but the stoic 82-year-old claims no credentials as a literary critic - he just loves to read a good book.