By The Spinoff Review of Books

Copyright thespinoff

Welcome to The Spinoff Books Confessional, in which we get to know the reading habits of Aotearoa writers, and guests. This week: Naomi Arnold, author of Northbound.

The book I wish I’d written

Is A River Alive? Yes, they are, is the premise of this book, and I feel attached to rivers so strongly that I wish I had come up with this. Robert Macfarlane is an obvious god of nature writing and I am envious of him and want to write something like this. He goes to Ecuador, India and Canada and writes so beautifully and carefully that you want to keep a notebook beside you when you read (and I did). I am still a bit enmeshed in its world.

Everyone should read

Books to their children. I won’t prescribe one book but rather all books, all ages, all the time. I read a Guardian article recently about how Gen Z parents are finding reading aloud to their children difficult and boring and it made me sad. As a kid, piling into bed so Mum and Dad could read us bedtime stories was so formative for my entire life. As a grown-up, reading aloud to my step-kids, niece, nephew, godson and assorted other children was and is such a joy to me, though admittedly I have never had to read aloud dozens of picture books every night for multiple children stalling at bedtime.

The book I want to be buried with

I forget books quickly once I’ve read them, so I have recently started keeping a commonplace book to record their delights. But I’m still thinking about Is A River Alive? and what it could mean for nature in Aotearoa; Macfarlane uses the Whanganui River’s legal personhood as a backdrop for his own river investigations. This coincided for me with New Zealand Geographic publisher James Frankham writing about lawyer Stephen Moe writing about Nature as Shareholder in the August 8 email newsletter: “What if nature was a shareholder in our companies and institutions, or shares held by an entity on behalf of nature? … This may be the defining question of our age”. I will shortly read Macfarlane again for his good sentences. I also splashed out on the hardback because I had a book voucher and it’s embossed and pretty, so it would look nice in my coffin.

The first book I remember reading by myself

I have pontificated about bedtime stories above, but Mum and Dad probably threw books on tape at us a fair bit as well so they could get things done. My younger sisters, Heather and Maddie, and I would chronically binge-listen to Story Time tapes and their magazines in the 1980s and 1990s. We had a few different read-along series: the ones that go: “You can read along with me in your book. You will know it’s time to turn the page when you hear the chimes ring like this. Brrrinnggg. Let’s begin now.” I remember sitting cosy in our bunk beds turning the pages of the magazine and reading along with the tape. I found a website recently that catalogues them (they were released as Story Teller in the UK and Story Time in Australia and New Zealand) and a YouTube channel that reads them.

Utopia or dystopia

Forgetting everything outside right now: dystopia. There are infinite ways to suffer and it’s more complex and interesting. I was going to paraphrase Tolstoy – all utopias are alike; each dystopia is dystopian in its own way – but it’s usually just plain old greed, hate or insecurity manifesting as a power obsession, isn’t it?

Fiction or nonfiction

As an English grad who is now a true-story writer, both. Fiction I usually binge, nonfiction I pick up and put down. At the moment I’m reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, about writing fiction. I have got curious about practicing the craft since reading the punishing labours of late Tauranga YA author Sherryl Jordan in her memoir Descending Fire, and since Michelle Duff, a friend, has made the switch from journalism to fiction so masterfully with her short-story collection Surplus Women.

To be honest I cannot understand how one can have the audacity to simply go about writing fiction. I haven’t tried since high school; these days it would require such an enormous suspension of self-doubt and disbelief. I can’t imagine ever being in possession of that confidence again, so I should probably try it.

It’s a crime against language to …

This is journalism but somewhere along the line the tendency to hyphenate ages where they shouldn’t be (“Natalia is 21-years-old”) has crept into common use and I despair. I make plenty of my own grammatical errors but how has this one come about? How? Also, reporters using quotes that are obviously cut and pasted from interviewing someone via text or Messenger personally hurts me. Their words are so dead on the page. Back in my day, in good old 2009, there were enough reporters in newsrooms for one of us to go down to the A&P Show or whale stranding and talk to people live ☹

The book character I identify with most

When I was a teen it was Tessa Duder’s Alex, although I wasn’t an Olympic swimmer in 1950s Auckland, nor very tall, nor had a talent for the stage, nor had a boyfriend. I think it was as simple as the fact that she was a New Zealand teen girl and thus I experienced something of the power of representation. Lines from this book still pop into my head – such as when I eat Weetbix with peaches, or a plate of steaming bacon and eggs, or imagine being a dolphin in another life.

The book I wish would be adapted for film or TV

Sherryl Jordan’s Rocco! Have any of her books been made into film or TV? They are perfect! I am reading or re-reading all of Jordan’s work in preparation for a panel discussion at the Tauranga Arts Festival, so have just finished Rocco, Winter of Fire, Wynter’s Thief, and Descending Fire, and am in the middle of Tanith. I can’t wait to find The Juniper Game at the library next. Rocco was her 13th novel but the first to be published; I am in awe of her perseverance.

Encounter with an author

I sat next to one of my heroes, Vermont author John Vaillant (The Tiger, The Golden Spruce) at a creative nonfiction conference dinner once. He was thoroughly dashing, as predicted. I still have his business card on my noticeboard a decade or so later.

Best thing about reading

Escaping the wittering of my own brain, first of all. Secondly, the delight of encountering a sentence good enough to make me gasp, then slow down to re-read and appreciate it. There is no purer joy.

Best place to read

Evenings when it’s raining; bed when you are skiving and shouldn’t be in bed; a light paperback you have found in a DOC hut, reading by candlelight when it’s not too cold to have your arms out of your sleeping bag. Also, I am hosting a reading retreat, a Nature Book Club if you will, at Tasman’s Maruia River Retreat in late January and it’s going to be a very good place to read, relax, and discuss books. I hope to host more in the future because I can’t think of anything better.

What are you reading right now?

I have always got multiple books on the go but often put them down for weeks and forget about reading entirely in favour of doom-scrolling, before deciding that is no life and picking up my books again. Then I must start afresh and happily fall back into them, propping them open with the butter dish while making toast, etcetera.

Currently caught in this cycle are Michelle Duff’s Surplus Women and Ali Mau’s memoir No Words for This; I am chairing their journalism session at the Nelson Arts Festival in October. On Kindle it’s Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust and I’ve been dipping into Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children when waiting in line somewhere. On Libby I’m reading Jared Savage’s Underworld. On Spotify and Libby audiobooks I have Tina Makereti’s The Mires and Bonnie Tsui’s On Muscle, but I often tune out of nonfiction audiobooks and have to keep rewinding; I find audio better for fiction.

Also on the bedside table is Tessa Duder’s YA classic Night Race to Kawau, which I found in a Little Free Library in Otago a couple months ago. Some of my favourite books have been free swaps from hostels, Little Free Libraries and the like; I appreciate the serendipity of a good book finding you at the right moment.

Northbound by Naomi Arnold (HarperCollins, $40) can be purchased from Unity Books. Naomi is appearing at the Nelson Arts Festival and Tauranga Arts Festival in October this year.