Whitcoulls and its Top 100
I've recently been coming across a number of really great books on $5 or $10 sale tables at branches of Whitcoulls, NZ's largest and really only surviving brick-and-mortar book-retailing chain. I've brought home some amazing stuff: recent-ish issues of Landfall, heavily discounted NZ non-fiction titles (like Fighting to Choose, which I did a quick review of recently and Linda Bryder's history of National Women's Hospital), a fair bit of fiction, including that ultimate sleeper/comatose literary hit Stoner, (which I also did a brief review of recently), as well as a smattering of penguin classics.
The fact that Whitcoulls was getting me and a pretty healthy number of other people through the door by selling actual real books with real words and real authors seems fantastic, given how most Whitcoulls shops have been increasingly about selling pens and very specific kinds of exercise books. But of course, as soon as a moment of thought or a lazy google-search is applied to the situation, the doleful truth makes itself apparent: Whitcoulls, like Bennets, like Dymmocks, like the NZ-contingent of Borders (itself owned by Whitcoulls), is selling off piles and piles of great books at great prices because they don't intend to keep being as much of a bookstore, and just need to get rid of the stuff at as small a loss as possible. Sad, but understandable.
Whitcoulls has never been the best, but its been a constant, and it has been nice to know that it's still a bookshop, with book-shelves and little notes reccommending this or that title, and an annual top 100 list. And in honour of the fact that Whitcoulls is a seller not just of reams of blank paper in a variety of formats but also a retailer of paper with text already printed onto it, I've set myself a task: to purchase (if I haven't already a copy) and (even if I have already read it) to read every book on the Whitcoulls top 100 books list of 2014-2015, from the Vampire Academy Series (yup.) to Andre Agassi's autobiography, to Catch 22, all the way to (though I'm not sure how I'll address this one) the original poor-kid-made-go(o)d- tale, The Bible.
Join me, won't you, imaginary reader, as I cast myself on the mercy of the NZ book-buying public and report back to you.
Let's do this.