Books editor Claire Mabey has some additions and alternatives to this year’s New Zealand Institute of Economic Research summer reading list for the PM.
Look, it’s fine. A panel of five men and one woman have chosen books they think prime minister Christopher Luxon should read. “This year’s list emphasises creating constructive narratives to convey perspectives, concepts, and facts,” reads the brief from the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER). “We hope this list captures the interest of the prime minister, his cabinet, ministerial advisers, and anyone with an interest in economics and public policy. We encourage New Zealanders to read and take time to reflect on our shared future – summer is an ideal time for that.”
Summer is, absolutely, an ideal time for reflection on our shared future, and for reading. However, this list is missing an opportunity for the country’s political leaders to allow the modes of creative narrative and lyricism – and women – to convey perspectives and concepts. Here is an alternative list to complement the NZIER’s shouts for the PM’s consideration:
Star Gazers by Duncan Sarkies (forthcoming, Feb 2025, Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Finally, we’re getting that alpaca novel. In February 2025, Luxon is going to be able to get his hooves all over the book that Toby Manhire of The Spinoff is saying is “like Succession, but with alpacas.”
Like Manhire, I (me, Mabey) have already read this allegorical story about the breakdown of democracy in the community of alpaca breeders in Aotearoa. Duncan Sarkies has long given this country the gift of socio-political commentary through art: the 1999 film, Scarfies (how to survive/make it all worse in Dunedin while skint), The Mysterious Secrets of Uncle Bertie’s Botanarium (an audio drama fictionalising, with hilarious and fantastical results, the colonial project of Cook’s botanist Lord Joseph Banks), the novels Demolition of the Century, and Two Little Boys. Sarkies’ stories follow the flawed pathways of the underdog, the outsiders, the sidelined.
Star Gazers, though, is the most overtly political of his works so far and closely resembles our recent times. There are conspiracies, a pandemic, corruption and moral ruptures. It is intelligent, entertaining and unearths many knotty opportunities for critical analysis (a requisite for the NZIER list). And it has this kind of endorsement: “‘Any book about an election, political intrigue and general ratfuckery is going to grab my attention. An allegorical narrative that is most definitely of its time. Sarkies asks important questions, challenging his readers and doing it in an accessible way. I loved it.’ — Grant Robertson
No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (Bloomsbury)
Sarah Hogan (deputy chief executive (WLG) and principal economist at NZIER) recommends The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt. It’s a bestseller for obvious reasons but there has been robust rebuttal to Haidt’s claims (in essence, that there is an oversimplification of the data at play). The inclusion of this book immediately brought to mind No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, a book that in the first half conveys the absurdity and distraction of living life online, and in the second half goes to the very heart of human connection.
Back in 2018, Lockwood (then, a pro Tweeter) wrote an essay called ‘How do we write now?’ The central argument is that social media is so insanely distracting that we now have to fight it for the brain space, the life space, required to write more than 200 characters at a time. The essay is life-affirming, with Lockwood reminding us of the granular physicality we have available to us, the place of concentration, if want it. Here’s a segment:
“The first necessity is to claim the morning, which is mine. If I look at a phone first thing the phone becomes my brain for the day. If I don’t look out a window right away the day will be windowless, it will be like one of those dreams where you crawl into a series of smaller and smaller boxes, or like an escape room that contains everyone and that you’ll pay twelve hours of your life for. If I open up Twitter and the first thing I see is the president’s weird bunched ass above a sand dune as he swings a golf club I am doomed. The ass will take up residence in my mind. It will install a gold toilet there. It will turn on shark week as foreplay and then cheat on its wife.
English will come out of it wrong, and then English will come wrong out of me.”
No One is Talking About This extends this essay by using autofiction (taking from your own life to tell a story that also uses the tools of fiction) to embody the life online versus life conundrum. In the first half the protagonist is a writer, famous for her absurdist/illuminating Tweets, her mind made sprawling and ludicrous by the limitless pathways that online interactions can take a brain. The second half turns firmly to the very stuff of physical, embodied love and life: tragedy, grief, the closeness of family, small towns, tight conversations and silence. The contrast between the two halves is profound, and illustrates, with complexity, the dimensions of our digital age.
Ultrawild: An Audacious Plan to Rewild Every City on Earth by Steve Mushin (Allen & Unwin)
Ultrawild by Steve Mushin is designed to spark a creative storm in anyone grappling with how to return some semblance of balance between industry and nature, and staunch the climate crisis before there’s no safe place left to stand. Mushin is a force of nature: his bonkers inventions spill over every page through text and images, like a comic, pulling together legit scientific and tech discoveries and invention and taking them to wild and beautiful places to show how creative thinking, and whacko first drafts, can spur solutions.
Conservationists young and old will get a huge kick out of the unadulterated optimism of Ultrawild. Mushin doesn’t hold himself back and his enthusiasm is an antidote to the shuddering, ineffective backpedalling and dilly-dallying of our world leaders when it comes to confronting what to do about the climate catastrophe.
Ultrawild pairs well, and colourfully, with Adrian Katz’s (senior economist, NZIER) recommendation of The Spirit of Green by Nobel Prize Winner William E. Nordhaus, which is essentially about the marriage of green thinking and economics.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler; She’s A Killer by Kirsten McDougall
American writer Octavia E. Butler published this dystopian, sci-fi novel about the effects of climate change and social injustice in 1993. It was first billed as a dystopian novel about the future. Now it’s a dystopian novel about … now. One of the most chilling visions in the book is the political devolution of the United States: in Butler’s novel the states are at war with each other for the dwindling remaining resources. If anyone needs a jog along when it comes to reflecting on the what’s in store for us all, very soon, it’s this.
Closer to home, Kirsten McDougall’s novel She’s A Killer is set just out of our time, an arm’s reach away, when the climate crisis has set in and gross inequality is firmly in our backyard with “wealthugees” bunking down in Aotearoa for the end times. Entertaining and sharp, this novel chimes with Butler’s, and with the only New Zealand book on the NZIER list, A Radically Different World by Jonathan Boston (BWB), recommended for the PM by Jason Shoebridge (chief executive, NZIER)
More Than a Roof: Housing in Poems and Prose (edited by Adrienne Jansen, Joan Begg, Rebecca Chester, Wesley Hollis, Roman Ratcliff, Landing Press)
This collection features over 120 poems, some from children, some from well-known writers like Harry Ricketts and Apirana Taylor, all reflecting what shelter, home, a place to lay your head means to them. At this time of increasing homelessness, this moving and intimate collection of multiple perspectives is a reminder to all political leaders that shelter is a basic human right and that shocking inequality should be unacceptable. The intimacy and honesty of this collection goes well with the Jonathan Boston BWB text (above) which addresses the problem of relocation, compensation and insurance policies in the face of the climate crisis.
Understanding Te Tiriti: A Handbook of basic facts about Te Tiriti o Waitangi by Roimata Smail (Wai Ako Press)
Last week we learned that an anonymous donor is posting a copy of this 32-page guide to Te Tiriti to every secondary school in New Zealand. Ideally every politician and their advisors would get themselves a copy, too. Perhaps then there could be some long summer nights applying critical thinking to the quiet removal of Treaty clauses from 28 pieces of legislation. Not to mention the Treaty Principles Amendment Bill.
Happy reading, prime minister.