Welcome to The Spinoff Books Confessional, in which we get to know the reading habits of Aotearoa writers, and guests. This week: Arena Williams, Labour MP for Manurewa.
The book I wish I’d written
The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing, which is about gardening during Covid, something I did a lot with my dad. It draws lines between ideas that seem unrelated but are actually tangled up at the roots. Gardens, food, land and power are political systems that can be changed by the people who depend on them. Dad grew up eating from his grandparents’ garden on the shores of the Ōhiwa Harbour, and still had his hands in the dirt with me in Manurewa 80 years on, planting potatoes by the maramataka. Gardens are not hobbies in Laing’s book; they’re systems of knowledge, memory and power.
Everyone should read
Everyone should read Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen, because it follows one family in 1971 in a way that feels uncomfortably familiar in 2026. Young people are facing war, economic uncertainty, and politics that feel morally incoherent. Franzen is great on how in those circumstances sincerity becomes competitive, with the church youth group’s emotional confessions reading like a dry run for TikTok culture. It’s a novel that understands how pressure pushes young people to extremes and how institutions too often turn that struggle into performance.
The book I want to be buried with
I want to leave my books to my kids and be buried at my marae, so none. But this question got me thinking about Eleanor de Aquitaine, who was buried and had a sculpture of her holding a book made for her tomb. It was a book-loving legacy carried on by her daughter Marie de Champagne. Marie was the patron of Chrétien de Troyes who wrote the first Lancelot stories into the tales of King Arthur.
The first book I remember reading by myself
Esio Trot by Roald Dahl. I read it aloud to my mum at a motel while she was getting ready for bed. After that I rocketed through fantasy and sci fi: Tamora Pierce’s Alanna series and her Circle of Magic books, which I now get to read to my daughter. JRR Tolkien, Ursula Le Guinn, Diana Wynne Jones, Anne Mccaffrey, Terry Pratchett and I was away.
I wish I’d never read
Hating a book you were sure you’d love is much worse than hating one you weren’t excited about, which is why I wish I’d never read The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir. She’s a great thinker, and I admire how she captured the post-war search for radical ideas after the collapse of old certainties. But her women didn’t have the stubbornness and discernment they needed to make their ideas last.
Utopia or dystopia
Utopia is imagining how the world could be made differently. I have always loved world building that changes a few core variables and lets people rearrange themselves, like Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn and Stormlight books, where magical systems reorganise class and politics; and The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, which demands an alternative to climate gridlock in this world, not a made up one. Change is a process with choices along the way, not a cataclysm.
Fiction or nonfiction
They scratch different itches into my brain. I love nonfiction that teaches me something I know a bit about but not a lot. That’s something like Feijoa: A Story of Obsession and Belonging by Kate Evans. My favourite fiction plays with half-formed ideas I’ve been bouncing around and pulls them together for me, which is why I enjoyed The Mires by Tina Makereti this summer. She unpicks how mundane a young man’s pipeline from online extremism to racism and violence looks to parents and neighbours. And one of the characters is a swamp!
The book that haunts me
I love ghost stories. I like telling visitors to parliament my versions of the ghosts who haunt the building, then regret it when I have to walk the corridors at midnight. Carmen Maria Machado’s short stories Her Body and Other Parties haunt me because the ghosts are longing, hungry, and the way women’s spectres live in the minds of others whether they want to or not. Tusiata Avia’s poems in Giving Birth to My Father haunt me because the grief is as much for the living as for the dead.
The book that made me laugh
Butter by Asako Yuzuki has bits that made me laugh out loud. In other bits I had to put it down and stare at the ceiling for a while in shock. The writing is so sensory that it becomes overwhelming, especially in the conversations between the three women at the centre of the story: murderer, journalist, friend. It was my favourite book of 2025.
The book character I identify with most
Sadie from Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. She is totally serious about turning great ideas into things that exist in the world. She’s prickly and has a weird backstory that isn’t mine, but what I really get is that she keeps choosing her friends even when she is being a bad one, guarding their shared purpose fiercely. The magic of the book is how real those friendships feel and how her loyalty to her friends plays out over their many years of work together.
Greatest New Zealand book
Bulibasha by Witi Ihimaera. It’s the unforgettable images. I think about the car race to the Pātūtahi Bridge a lot when I’m driving long stints, and the Mormon angel turning up in a paddock with an American accent.
Greatest New Zealand writer
Maurice Gee. A great writer and a great New Zealander. The Burning Boy is the one I love best. His stories shaped how I see this country.
Best place to read
Everywhere, with friends. I read on an app with a library of books that I share with my friends. We egg each other on to finish books so we can talk about them.
What I’m reading right now
My book club picked Game Changer and Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid before Zohran Mamdani name dropped it in a press conference.
