BY FAR the most envied Times writer of 2008 is Chris Ayres. This is partly because he's our LA correspondent - a very jolly gig indeed - but mainly because he's written a book about his poolside life there and allowed the publisher to use a picture of him in a white suit on a sun lounger on the front. Title: Death by Leisure . Subtitle: A Cautionary Tale (John Murray, £12.99/offer £11.69). Yeah, right. The only reason not to read this distressingly funny story of how things can go so right for a ginger-top clever clogs from way north of Watford is that the movie will probably be along soon - a bit like the movie of his other book, about chickening out of an Iraq War embed half-way to Baghdad.

How does he do it? How does any working reporter find time for books?The answer in The Times's case lies, naturally, in the relentlessly productive minds of its staff. This year's subjects range from growing your own sugar snaps - Valentine Low's splendid allotment memoir, One Man and His Dig (Pocket Books, £7.99/£7.59), which includes the line, “oh, you've got a lovely action with that hoe”, to growing your own memory - Remember, Remember by Ed Cooke (Viking, £12.99/£11.69) and the alleged awfulness of foreign holidays - Michael Moran's cheerfully grumpy Sod Abroad (John Murray, £7.99/£7.59).

There's even a novel. Kate Muir's West Coast (Headline, £6.99/£6.64) evokes claustrophobic life in a small Scottish fishing town and pairs it off with the excess and emptiness of London's Brit Art scene. It doesn't quite explain how Britain came to be run by brooding Scots but it draws on Muir's own roots to tell a story of naked Scottish ambition.

Ben Macintyre is Antonia Fraser to Muir's Pinter; he does the family's nonfiction. This year he might have taken a break after Agent Zigzag, but instead he squeezed out For Your Eyes Only (Bloomsbury, £20/£18), a handsome and quasi-official history of James Bond. It features pictures of harpoons and Halle Berry's bikini and tells you, among other things, that Bond was actually quite abstemious. He liked his martinis long and strong, but one at a time.

Like Macintyre, Bronwen Maddox is a former Times US Editor. Unlike him she has resisted the penumbral lure of spooks and sirens and stuck resolutely to public life as the paper's chief foreign commentator.Which must be how she had the foresight to bring out In Defence of America (Duckworth, £12.99/£11.69) two months before Obama's win. This is a vital reminder for those already seeking new ways to bash the US that it is its own best advert for democracy and open markets, sub-prime notwithstanding.

John Naish might disagree. He's had enough of blank perplexity at why we go on consuming even though we know it will destroy the planet without making us happy. That's the riddle he sets out to solve in Enough (Hodder, £12.99/£11.69). The result is more engaging than either of two books called Affluenza (one British, one American) that have covered similar ground. It's also more apt, affluence being history and all, which won't harm sales of Anna Shepard's How Green Are My Wellies (Eden Project, £14.99/£13.49). The Times's green guru shows you how to do your bit for gaia without sacrificing style, and she leads by example without preaching. Lucia van der Post's Things I Wish My Mother Had Told Me (John Murray, 16.99/ £15.29) would make a fine companion piece: it has chapters on personal shoppers, but also on decluttering.

Things I wish my mother had told me include: “A journalist is a reporter without a job.” “The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life.” And, most important: “Do not trust a Hungarian unless he has a third eye in his forehead.” These are from Scorn: The Anthology (Little Books, £10.99/ £9.89) by Matthew Parris, who includes a reference to himself by Alastair Campbell as “the little shit”.

If Parris has learnt a thing or two about people, Simon Barnes has learnt a lot about horses - but nothing so moving as his discovery in The Horsey Life (Short Books, £12.99/ £11.69) that a mare called Dolores, the star of the book, “understands the situation perfectly” when he gets her to walk to her stable with his son. Eddie has Down's syndrome. Dolores is gentle and obedient, and gives him the satisfaction of eating what he has put in her bowl. “Of all the great things Dolores has done for me in her lifetime,” Barnes writes, “this is the equal of any.” I bet Eddie would love a white Christmas. And I bet we won't have one; better to bet on a white Easter. Such wisdom leaps from the pages of Since Records Began (Collins, £9.99/ £9.49), by Times weatherman Paul Simons. He is to meteorology what Tim Moorey is to Times crosswords, whose How To Master The Times Crossword (Times Books, £12.99/£11.69) tells you how to do just that.

No one has written a book called How To Master The Times, but James Harding might, eventually; he edits it. In the meantime he's written Alpha Dogs (Atlantic, £22/£19.80), about the people who reinvented modern political campaigning. Everyone around here seems to agree it's brilliant.

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