No bare bums in real reading

by June Peka

Real Reading is 10 times more fun than Reality TV. No botox, bare bums, fake tans and crocodile tears –just good old life, and when it’s all about life in Godzone, you can ten times that again. I’ve loved these three in recent months. They’re all 10 out of 10 in my opinion.

Ruth Shaw’s two tiny bookshops at Manapouri tell just half of her life story, but cleverly she has wound the stories from within them around her extraordinary and eventful previous life. Baby boomers in particular will identify with her early years growing up rural in the 50s and 60s – the freedoms of fishing, digging caves, building huts, and then the Saturday night dances, trying a first cigarette, maybe a shandy, and boys.

It’s fair to say that the path of Ruth’s life was set forever at one such dance, when she was 17 and raped by a group of boys she’d thought were friends. Her pain is still palpable nearly 60 years later, compounded by the loss to adoption, of the baby boy who was born as a result of that first, brutal sexual experience.

You won’t be invited to feel pity for

Ruth, but if you have an ounce of empathy you will understand how her lifetime habits of avoidance of intimate relationships, her devilmay-care attitude to personal safety (and sometimes rules), her constant moving on, the come and go depression, all stem from that happening in 1964. The upside is that it makes for riveting real reading – about pirates on faraway seas, the King’s Cross red light zone, environmental issues, love (a few times before she settled down with Lance, the real love of her life) and laughter. Apparently Ruth had been encouraged for years to get these words on paper; well done to those who finally made it happen. There can’t be a sequel surely, but if I’m wrong I’ll be first in with an order.