Welcome to The Spinoff Books Confessional, in which we get to know the reading habits of Aotearoa writers, and guests. This week: former Police officer turned bookseller, Brenda Channer, manager of Martinborough Books & Post, which won the Ugly Hill Press Bookshop of the Year at the 2025 Aotearoa New Zealand Book Industry Awards.
Funniest thing you’ve overheard on the shop floor
The funniest thing I hear on the shop floor, and it happens every now and then, is a whispered argument between customers about which bookshop is the best. Coming into my bookshop sparks the argument because they didn’t expect to find such a gem tucked away in Martinborough and now they feel the need to rank it. They always think I can’t hear them, but I can!
Best thing about being a bookseller
Selling books! Having a bookshop where all sorts of people can come and find something to read that is going to entertain, challenge, inform, validate and transport them is satisfying in a way that doesn’t grow old. A clothing shop will clothe you, a café will feed you but a bookshop can take you to other worlds, scare the living daylights out of you, make you cry, laugh, gasp, show you how to build something, knit something, paint something – the list is never ending and endlessly stimulating for the bookseller as much as the customer.
Worst thing about being a bookseller
There isn’t much downside to be honest. At the macro level running a business is bloody hard work no matter what industry you are in. On a micro level, tearing the front and back covers off books to be returned is a terrible feeling no matter how often you do it. And never do it in front of customers – it’s like they’re witnessing murder!
Most requested books
Classic fiction – both adult and children’s. Jane Austen, Dostoevsky, Capote, Ishiguro, Proust, Beatrix Potter, Margaret Mahy, Kenneth Graham – I guess they are classics for a reason. In the school holidays I cannot keep up with sticker book sales. Books about the Wairarapa and about Aotearoa’s flora and fauna are frequent requests as many visitors to the area and the country find their way to Martinborough.
I am often asked about reluctant readers – usually by a parent or grandparent. There is some very good fiction for children that addresses this request – graphic novels, books with more pictures than text, books written with older content at a younger reading level. For a reluctant adult reader I interrogate them a little about what they love to do when they are not reading and let that information guide me to a book. Bookselling can be surprisingly intimate – customers offer you pieces of themselves in return for a story.
Favourite bookshop
My husband and I were travelling on the Canal d’Midi in France and he secretly arranged a little detour onto a side waterway just so I could go to this bookshop. It is in a tiny village, but it is a huge secondhand bookshop with a massive mezzanine floor. The wooden building, the lighting, the books all carefully arranged but still managing to look jumbled, the almost constant deliveries – trucks with cartons of books, people emptying their car boots of bags and boxes of books, people on bicycles pulling up with baskets of books – it was astonishing. If you squinted a little bit and pretended you didn’t know the masses amount of work it takes to make a place like that tick, it was a bookshop from a fairytale.
The book I wish I’d written
Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Such a great, smart, deeply flawed, sometimes thoroughly unlikeable character. He played the violin badly which I also did, and I thought that was a clever inclusion. It’s probably not a coincidence that I joined the New Zealand Police and worked as a frontline officer for 10 years. I have to say, I did not solve any crimes using Holmesian methods of deduction during my tenure!
Everyone should read
Everyone should just read because it is fundamental to success on any level. Knowing how to read does far more than enable a person to function in society. This is where creativity, empathy, desire to do and be better, and an interest in the world beyond us is born. Being struck dumb by images of starving children in Gaza is a terrible but fleeting experience. Reading about the history of Palestine, Israel, and the world’s response to their peoples, lands, and cultures informs and compels action. The world needs more reading.
The book character I identify with most
Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz. When I changed my surname after my first marriage ended, I chose Gale. The Wizard of Oz is wall-to-wall allegory but in a nutshell, Dorothy did not fit in with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, and when the opportunity presented itself to be somewhere else she followed that path. Even so, the desire to be “home” never left her and in fact grew stronger the more embedded in Oz she became – but it wasn’t Kansas she was looking for, it was a sense of belonging and self-knowledge that was her real desire. Make of that what you will. I could talk about it for hours.
What I’m reading right now
Poorhara by Michelle Rahurahu – for an event. The Mind Electric by Pria Anand – for book club. The Chemist by A A Dhand – for pleasure. And I really want to start Runt and the Diabolical Dognapping, both by Craig Silvey, because I love children’s books.
