The woman who read Auckland: Janet McAllister visits New Lynn Library

The exterior of the New Lynn Library. Photo: Luke Harvey.

First we take Mt Eden; then we take New Lynn."

I carried out this Auckland hipster rewrite of Leonard Cohen last week, taking the train from Mt Eden to the New Lynn War Memorial Library, walking under the neon-mesh doodads of artworld favourite Gregor Kregar along the way.

Kregar's work is enjoyable (if less phallic in the flesh than in its Anthony Weiner-worthy pics) and altogether my easy journey was a relief.

I once drove around New Lynn in circles searching in vain for its library. Hot tip: the library's in the Lynnmall carpark. It's a shopper-convenient oasis of style in a desert of asphalt; its windows are beautiful but all they frame are the Golden Arches.

Still, it's peaceful. Mikey and Tahi - both 15 or thereabouts - tell me they come to the library every day because they both lost their dads recently and it gives them a place to "get away from everything" and chill. They go upstairs to the light and airy attic, where the computers have been banished to, to hang out on Facebook.

Three years ago, to entice more teenage visitors, the library held a Rube Goldberg "book dominoes" event; the resulting YouTube clip, set to the 1812 Overture, is epic.

Janine, retired in paua earrings and a sensible sun hat, always brings her notebook of recommended authors. The 2005 library was refurbished seven months ago - the kids got a sweet wooden climbing "tree" - but Janine thinks the new principle of separately shelving "crime" is a shelving crime.

Is "crime" really so different from "mystery"? "It's not cut and dried," contends Janine. Genre segregation makes it twice as long to find the authors in her notebook. I'm convinced.

Ethne walks with a spring in her step to Blockhouse Bay library twice a week and buses to New Lynn library on Fridays and Wednesdays when she also attends the Salvation Army church. In South Africa, she lived in a small town "and you had to read what they gave you". Here, even at six books a week, she won't run out of reading material thanks to the "peachy" library system: "I ring South Africa and I rub it in!"

From the front courtyard, where roses cling romantically to brick columns, the library looks a bit like a white ceramic wharenui, except wharenui have straight spines (ridge poles) and the roof of this building is artfully lopsided.

The entrance is weirdly blocked by a bisecting wall; it's certainly a building of two halves, with the library on the right. Inside, running down the middle corridor, a superb permanent New Lynn ceramics history exhibition stars my childhood dinner plates.

A Maurice Gee quote on an inner wall reminds us the Whau creek was once "where country ended and the suburbs began". You can see it if you turn your back on the McDonald's signs.