Mybookshelf

‘ Books Do Furnish a Room”, according to the title of a 1971 novel by Anthony Powell, and if that is the case my house is well furnished, because almost every room contains overflowing bookshelves while books also proliferate on bedside tables, desks, coffee tables and even ( in my study, and to the despair of my wife) on the floor.

Sometimes I think, “My kingdom for a Kindle”, but really, being an “old- brain” type, I much prefer paper and printer’s ink to a screen. To quell the rising tide, we regularly head off to Jason Books in O’Connell St with a carton full of cullings ( choice titles, many of them).

I am promiscuous, with half a dozen titles always on the go. As it happens, I live with a keen reader; my wife, Helen, always has a book or two in progress ( though normally she’s monogamous in the book department — strictly one at a time). I, on the contrary, am promiscuous with half a dozen titles always on the go, typically a novel or two, some poetry, a biography, some art books.

Fortunately our tastes do coincide about fiction, both classic ( Jane Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Flaubert, Conrad, Virginia Woolf) and contemporary favourites ( Alice Munro, Annie Proulx, Ian McEwan, Richard Ford, Peter Carey, Maurice Gee). We don’t like getting rid of good novels; we often read them again, though it’s been a while since either of us picked up Graham Greene, Patrick White or Iris Murdoch.

I am promiscuous, with half a dozen titles always on the go.

For my latest book, Bloomsbury South, I visited research libraries around New Zealand for archival or manuscript resources, but much of the material I needed was on my own shelves – complete sets of Landfall, Yearbook of the Arts in New Zealand, Islands, Art New Zealand, for example, which I’ve accumulated during decades. Some books are now rare and valuable; indeed some early Caxton Press titles are worth hundreds of dollars.

I have always loved books as objects and one of the pleasures of putting Bloomsbury South together was to include covers of books which have been sitting on those crowded shelves for more than half a century. Yes, books do furnish a room, but more importantly, they also can furnish a mind.