Welcome to The Spinoff Books Confessional, in which we get to know the reading habits of Aotearoa writers, and guests. This week: Sonya Wilson, author and founder and executive director of Kiwi Christmas Books, which gifts books to families in need every Christmas.

The book I wish I’d written

I mean, so many. All of the good ones! I am constantly astounded by the minds and brains of the writers whose books I read. The thinking behind them, you know? The language employed. We’ve been writing books for what, 4,000 years, and people are still coming up with new and interesting ways to sling a metaphor or arrange a sentence or describe a tree. I’m in a constant state of awe when I’m reading. The last three “adult” books I’ve read, for example – Question 7 by Richard Flanagan, State of Wonder by Ann Patchett and The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff – I think they are all genius, astounding writers, philosophers actually, and I think I would die happy if I was half as good as any of them. As for children’s writers – I recently read Oddity by Eli Brown and would quite happily have written that – it is clever and wise and excellent. I would love to have come up with the concepts at the heart of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Daemons and Dust – brilliant.

Everyone should read

At the risk of sounding like a giant nerd: all South Islanders* should read the Ngāi Tahu Settlement Claims Act 1998. 

OK, hear me out. It’s not the dry piece of legislature that it sounds – well a lot of it is, but the vast statutory acknowledgement sections for each of the rivers and lakes and mountains are astounding and fascinating. It sets out how the land was discovered and explored, how it was viewed and valued and named, and it represents years and years of hard graft by the people who collected those stories. If you want to learn about Te Wai Pounamu, this is a really great place to start. (Then you could move on to Kā Huru Manu, Ngāi Tahu’s cultural atlas which is also fascinating – I lose hours looking at that thing.) 

The vast, book-length document also includes the Crown’s apologies for how the early land deals were done, and how Ngāi Tahu were treated in the 150 years following.  Everyone who works in local or central government and/or complains about having to consult iwi on local infrastructure project, should read that part. (I’m looking at a certain mayor or two here.) 

*If you’re a North Islander: find your local iwi’s settlement act, if there is one, and read that.

The book I want to be buried with

Or the book that could bury me? You could make an environmentally-friendly coffin out of the pulped pages of my manuscript for my first book, Spark Hunter – my novel I was writing while I was trying to learn how to write a novel – pages and pages of scenes that I wrote and then discarded. There are a lot of them, and some of them were very hard to let go of.

The first book I remember reading by myself

The Berenstain Bears and the Spooky Old Tree. I had probably memorised the words because it was read to me so many times before I read it to myself. “Three little bears, one with a light, one with a stick, one with a rope.” (I wanted to be the bear with the light.)

The first chapter book I remember reading: Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World. I remember being so taken by that story. The dad who’d gone rogue and become a poacher (but you know, for good, honest reasons) and then the audacity of the caper that followed – lacing raisins with sleeping pills and sewing them up with a needle and thread in order to drug and capture hundreds of pheasants. What’s not to love? And they lived in a Gypsy caravan. I really wanted to live in a Gypsy caravan. 

The book I pretend I’ve read

I brought The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan because I was standing in front of Peter Frankopan and Peter Frankopan was so lovely and so smart and boy could he talk. He talked and talked to me, and he was super lovely and super smart and so I had to buy his book, in order to pretend that I was smart, too, because I wasn’t sure I was convincing him with my witty banter. I declared I would read it immediately, but months later, it’s sitting on my bookshelf, intelligent and academic and worthy, an 800-page perfectly preserved brick of a book that has not yet had its spine cracked. I bet it’s brilliant, though.

Fiction or nonfiction

Fiction, every day of the week! Made-up stories are where you learn the great truths of the world, of course. I am a massive believer in the power of fiction, in its ability to show us perspectives different to our own, to put us in someone else’s skin for the length of their fictional life. Reading is good in obvious ways – it builds our vocabulary and general language skills and general academic intelligence, and it exercises that imaginative side of the brain that becomes a problem-solving master tool but it also massively increases our empathy, emotional intelligence, so many other difficult-to-measure-things.

There is good research out there about this – that kids who read books become good, kind, successful adults, more in tune and engaged with their communities and with themselves and the big wide world around them and they’re more likely to be successful as adults, kids who read books, and man, it’s a shame that so many kids in this country are missing out on all of that because they don’t have books in their homes but oh, did I mention that I run a charity where you can donate great works of fiction to kids who don’t have books in their homes? You can find Kiwi Christmas Books here.

The book that haunts me

Flowers in the Attic. The arsenic-laden donuts… the, er, questionable familial relationships… I read it aged 11, I think.

Greatest New Zealand writer

For children: Margaret Mahy. I love her middle grade and young adult fiction, but I think her greatest genius is found in her stories for very young kids. I loved A Lion in the Meadow with all my heart when I was little.

Best food memory from a book

Apples. Why did the lion eat apples? It was in a meadow, sure, but apples? I used to think about that a lot.

Encounter with an author

At the Auckland Writers Festival in May I met Lauren Groff. I hadn’t read any of her books at the time and didn’t know who she was. We chatted away in the green room – me blabbing on about something that had happened at my kid’s football game earlier, and other banal, non-impressive things. 

I had no idea at the time that I was in the presence of stone-cold genius. I don’t know how writers of great and immeasurable stone-cold genius are supposed to act, but this, in my mind, was not it. She was super lovely. And, like, normal.

Probably best I didn’t know. I may have bowed and genuflected and kissed her hand and swore fealty or whatever it is that you do for your queen, or just demanded that she be my best friend and really, properly, embarrassed myself. 

Best place to read

Outside, in the sun, next to a large body of water with a drink in hand so you can get yourself into a read-sip-snack-get too hot-swim-read-drink-snack-get too hot-swim-read type scenario.

What are you reading right now

Peta Carey’s beautiful large-format book, Tamatea Dusky. Research for my next children’s novel which is largely set there. She writes, “it’s difficult to comprehend the enormity and complexity of the topography of Fiordland. Or to find the words to describe it.”

She of course then goes on to describe the “grand theatre of sun, cloud, wind, fiord and mountain” beautifully – or as well as anyone could.  

The Vaster Wilds, by Lauren Groff. Honestly, this book. I read it a couple of months ago and then stopped about three-quarters of the way through because I loved it so much that I didn’t want it to end. I read two other books before allowing myself to go back and finish it. And now I am reading it again. I NEVER re-read books straight away like this. It is a “clutch” book for me – one of those books you want to walk around clutching to your chest, like a bookish heroine in a period drama. Lauren Groff is a stone-cold genius. 

The Kiwi Christmas Book appeal has now begun: for more information on how to donate a new book to a family in need this Christmas, see the website here. Spark Hunter by Sonya Wilson ($25, The Cuba Press) is available to purchase through Unity Books.