The week’s best-selling books at the Unity stores in High St, Auckland (which is opening a new children’s bookstore right next door, this weekend, with prizes and balloons and saveloys*; get along, take the kids!) and Willis St, Wellington.
*no saveloys
AUCKLAND UNITY
1 Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (Jonathan Cape, $35)
Popular novel.
2 Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester (William Collins, $37)
It’s Father’s Day on Sunday.
3 The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson (MacMillan, $35)
It sold out at Unity this week! Fortunately, another shipment has been ordered, to satisfy the lusts of those who wish to know how best not to give a fuck.
4 Less by Andrew Sean Greer (Little, Brown and Company, $35)
Popular novel.
5 Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (Profile Books, $33)
Bythell is among the authors appearing at the Christchurch WORD Festival this weekend. There is also crime writer Denise Mina, Diana Wichtel (Driving to Treblinka), Spinoff Review of Books literary editor Steve Braunias, poets Robin Robertson and Tayi Tibble, humourists David Slack and Tom Scott, and the thinking man’s drinking man, Dr Jarrod Gilbert.
6 Coming To It: Selected Poems by Sam Hunt (Potton & Burton, $30)
They buried him today
up Schnapper Rock Road,
my father in cold clay.
7 100 Poems by Seamus Heaney (Faber & Faber, $28)
Be advised my passport’s green.
No glass of ours was ever raised
to toast the Queen.
8 Tinkering: The Complete Book of John Clarke by John Clarke (Text, $40)
Wit, preserved.
9 Orchid & the Wasp by Caoilinn Hughes (Oneworld Publications, $38)
“The freewheeling first novel by Irish poet Hughes is dominated more by character than plot, but the determined, daring central character is worthy of the spotlight. The episodic narrative follows Gael from the age of 11, when a scandalous business proposal to her fellow classmates at a Catholic school (to market fake blood capsules for the purpose of faking virginity) gets her invited to ‘take her depraved influence elsewhere’, through to age 20, when she returns to Ireland after an eventful few months in New York City”: Publisher’s Weekly.
10 Factfulness by Dr Hans Rosling (Sceptre, $30)
The Swedish public speaker and sword swallower died in 2017, but his clichés live on.
WELLINGTON UNITY
1 Matter of Fact: Talking Truth in a Post-Truth World by Jess Berentson-Shaw (Bridget Williams Books, $15)
Berentson-Shaw, speaking with awesome incomprehensibility in an interview with the Herald about her book: “I do think media producers need to consider very carefully the amplification given to misinformation and misinformed voices in the context of the unbalanced information environment and human bias.”
2 Big Weather: Poems of Wellington edited by Gregory O’Brien and Louise St John (Penguin, $30)
Acne blossoms scarlet on their cheeks,
These kids up Porirua East…(Sam Hunt)
3 Is It Bedtime Yet?: Parenting … the Hilarious, the Hair-Raising, the Heart-breaking by Emily Writes et al (Penguin Random House, $35)
Popular parenting book.
4 Less by Andrew Sean Greer (Little, Brown, $25)
5 Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (Jonathan Cape, $35)
6 Poūkahangatus by Tayi Tibble (Victoria University Press, $20)
Obviously I am Edie Sedgwick
in last night’s eyelashes slept in and cried on.
7 Burger Wellington: The Best Burgers from New Zealand’s Culinary Capital by Lucy Corry (Mary Egan, $35)
Burgers of Wellington.
8 Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft (Text, $37)
Pretentious novel.
9 Coming To It: Selected Poems by Sam Hunt (Potton Burton, $30)
10 Death of Truth by Michiko Kakutani (HarperCollins, $27)
Liberal hand-wringing.
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