Booklover

from the Herald on Sunday, 6 SEptember, 2009


Murray Gray owns the Gone West bookshop in Titirangi and is Programme director of the annual Going West Books and Writers Festival

The book I love most is… As the owner of a bookshop I have access to so many titles but if I had to have an author I love most it would be either Len Deighton or John Le Carre.

The book I’m reading right now is… ...I’m reading authors rather than books, either from the new stock which comes into the shop or from the fine library I have in Titirangi. The attraction is in reading a complete canon of an author, not as they are being published, but farther on when you can read the roman-flueve as one work. For some writers, such as Lee Child, the plot has little relevance being basically an exercise in geography as location flickers around the world. The hero always wins so the story fades to the back. The work is the character, Jack Reacher. Big and quiet he’s an avenging angel with only a folding tooth brush as accessory. So I read them as a sequence of events and will get the missing titles from the library.For George MacDonald Fraser I took a different approach. I read the Flashman series in reverse order as that was how they arrived in the shop. I bought a few for a modest price from another store, and now am at the end.

The book I’d like to read next… has not yet jumped out at me. It depends on what turns up at the library or comes into the shop.

The Going West Books and Writers Festival has its Literary Weekend “By Buy Bye The Book” at Titirangi War Memorial Hall from September 11-13. http://www.goingwest.co.nz/