Top Circulating Adult Fiction - Genres

The Yellow Books, 1887 . Fine Art. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 18 May 2016.
http://quest.eb.com/search/108_303306/1/108_303306/cite

“Knowledge is like money: To be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.”
― Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man  

In the library, "circulation" means a lot of things.  What's sometimes called the "library card desk" is also known as "circulation".  When we look at a book's record, we count how many times it has checked out as its "circs". The library's collection floats (items checked out at one branch and returned at another stay at the branch at which they are returned), but its items circulate.

For this post, we've chosen to feature the top circulating adult books system-wide from two fiction genres and general non-fiction, as of May 18, 2016. Mystery was by far the most popular genre in the top 200 circulating fiction books system-wide! Several of the top circulating non-fiction titles are graphic novel series with multiple volumes, or other multiple volume series, but that just makes the enduring popularity of a certain book about housekeeping and orderliness even more impressive, we think.

Top Circulating Mystery/Suspense Fiction for Adults (system-wide)

1.  The Crossing by Michael Connelly

2. Tricky Twenty-Two by Janet Evanovich

3. Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

4. The Guilty by David Baldacci

5. Fool Me Once by Harlan Coben

6. NYPD Red 4 by James Patterson

7. X by Sue Grafton

8. Private Paris by James Patterson

9. Cross Justice by James Patterson

10. Clawback by J. A. Jance

Top Circulating Romance Fiction for Adults (system-wide)

1.  Property of a Noblewoman by Danielle Steel

2. Precious Gifts by Danielle Steel

3. A Girl’s Guide to Moving On by Debbie Macomber

4. The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende

5. Blue by Danielle Steel

6. The Obsession by Nora Roberts

7. Undercover by Danielle Steel

8. Blue by Danielle Steel

9. The Liar by Nora Roberts

10. After You by Jojo Moyes

Top Circulating Historical Fiction for Adults (system-wide)

1.  All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

2. The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

3. The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende

4. Cometh the Hour by Jeffrey Archer

5. The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson

6. Circling the Sun by Paula McClain

7. At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier

8. In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume

9. The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks

10. A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

Top Circulating Non-Fiction for Adults (system-wide)

1.  Attack on Titan by Hajime Isayama (series)

2. The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman (series)

3. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

4. Justice League by Geoff Johns (series)

5. Guinness World Records by various authors

6. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

7. Spark Joy by Marie Kondo

8. Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

9. Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology by Leah Remini

10. Moon Handbooks (travel guides)

 

Blast from the Past - The 1970s in Fiction

Historical pastiche is one of our most important art forms, cutting across all media. We come to know it best through what we might call “decade-ism,” the artistic practice of parceling out history in ten-year spans. There is a menu of decades to choose from, and an audience with sophisticated tastes in recent period detail waiting to sample the latest clever, self-aware tweaking of classic ingredients. 
~Nicholas Dames, "Seventies Throwback Fiction"

When Booklist suggested reading books set in the '70s as the "perfect backdrop for your ’70s-era reverie" following the death of David Bowie earlier this year, we confess we were intrigued. In some ways historical fiction set in the '70s hits dangerously close to home - don't know about you, but it hurts a little bit that our lifetime is considered "history". However, it is ripe for the picking, plot-wise - an era of increasing social progressive values, oil crisis, increased violence in the Middle East, the Vietnam War coming to an end, more decolonization in Africa, revolution in Cambodia and Iran, the rise of the use of terrorism by militant groups such as the Baader-Meinhof, military dictatorships arising in South America, Jonestown, the first child was born by in vitro fertilisation (IVF), the Kent State shootings, second-wave feminism...and much more. Disco and punk, prog rock and glam rock dominated the airwaves and clubs, even as the world mourned Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix. On the big screen we watched Jaws, Star Wars, The Godfather, Rocky, Annie Hall, Kramer vs. Kramer, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show was born; on the small screen there were shows like The Brady Bunch, Sanford and Son, Wonder Woman. HBO was born in 1972. Kids were playing Space Invaders for the first time. It was also the beginning of the Me Generation - folks were wearing bell-bottoms and turtlenecks, sideburns and feathered hair, to go to hot tub parties and self-help programs. People embraced jogging. Streaking was a thing.

How do you feel about fiction returning to the '70s? Do you feel "interested in how the books portray an era [you] lived through, while younger people might be interested in learning more about the social and political turmoil of the time"? Or, like Nicholas Dames in the article quoted above, that "[t]he novelists who have lately returned to the Seventies seem to be making a stronger claim: that there is something uniquely vital to the decade, and in fact uniquely to be missed"? Are you more interested in novels that deal with coming of age, politics and social change, or stories set in different parts of the world? We have compiled a list of recent novels set in the 1970s which we hope evoke the era for you, whether they are awakening memories or stimulating newfound interest in the issues of another generation.

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Ed Tarkington

The Girl Who Slept With God by Val Brelinski

Man at the Helm by Nina Stibbe 

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner 

Harvard Square by André Aciman 

Our Young Man by Edmund White 

City On Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg 

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen 

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James 

The Blue Line by Ingrid Betancourt 

The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah 

Now And In the Hour of Our Death by Patrick Taylor

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita [eAudiobook]

Rainey Royal by Dylan Landis

Fallout by Sadie Jones 


Links

The Best Selling Novels of the 1970s [Ranker] 

Best 1970s Historical Fiction [Goodreads] 

The 1970s [History.com] 

The Seventies [CNN]

1970s Fashion: 23 Style Moments That Defined The Decade [Marie Claire]

Which Are the Most Addictive Reads of the Last 25 Years?

Van Gogh, Novel Reader,Paint., 1888. Photo. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 13 May 2016.
http://quest.eb.com/search/109_233205/1/109_233205/cite

Here they are: the books we passed on to our closest friends, fought over at book club, lugged with us on every move and think about still.

~Oprah.com, "The Most Addictive Books of the Last 25 Years"

Who is the latest arbiter of must-reads? You know you read your share of Oprah's Book Club books in the past, unless you're Jonathan Franzen (and even he eventually called a truce). "Good Morning America" and "Today" both tried to fill her shoes, but we think they never managed to have the cachet of Oprah, in our humble opinion.

So, we're back eyeing Oprah.com for more book tips. Last May, she published a list of "the most addictive books of the last 25 years" (the list includes fiction and non-fiction):

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green [YA]

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

White Teeth by Zadie Smith [eBook]

House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search For Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert

Fifty Shades of Gray by E L James

Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple

One Day by David Nicholls

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Angela's Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins [YA]

Bossypants by Tina Fey

Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

What do you think of the list? As of this year, that would be the most addictive books published since 1991. We consulted some other "best-of lists" (Flavorwire, HuffPost, the A.V. Club, Goodreads, USA Today) and found what we think might be a few more contenders, based on their popularity here at the library:

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling [J]
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver [eBook]
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Girl On the Train by Paula Hawkins

 Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
The Time-Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Selected Stories by Alice Munro
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
A Tale For the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky [YA]
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Sarah by JT Leroy
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie [YA]
His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman [YA]
Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson
Just Kids by Patti Smith
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
The Liars' Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr
Naked by David Sedaris

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo

We note that many of these "most addictive" and "best-of" titles have been made into movies. Is that a good index of quality or popularity, do you think? Which have you read? Which did you find most addicting? What titles do you think shouldn't be on our list, or should be?

Featured Author: Patrick Ness

I've only ever really wanted to be a writer... I made up stories all the time when I was young, though I was usually too embarrassed to show them to anybody. That's okay if you do that; when you're ready, you're ready. The important thing is to keep writing.
~Patrick Ness' Biography on Scholastic.com

Patrick Ness is an author of primarily Young Adult fiction holding dual U.S. and British citizenship - he moved to England in 1999, aged 28, shortly after publishing his first story. He's won several literary prizes, including the Carnegie Medal twice (he is one of seven writers to win this medal twice, and no one has won three), the Costa Children’s Book Award, and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize.

Patrick Ness dislikes onions, has a tattoo of a rhinoceros, has run three marathons, and the most dangerous book he ever read was The Color Purple:

I was a white, sheltered, male suburban teen given two fully loaded barrels of feminism, racial history, slavery, tenderness, the beauty of sexuality, and (incidentally) formal experimentation. Aged 14, pre-internet, I won’t pretend I understood everything, but the world of reading was suddenly so much bigger, suddenly so much more intriguingly, properly dangerous, that I was never the same again. A genuinely mind-expanding book.

In September 2015, after the photograph of the deceased three-year old refugee Aylan Kurdi was published, Ness was instrumental in raising £659,755 to help asylum seekers, particularly children, along with authors like Suzanne Collins and Philip Pullman. In October 2015, he announced that he would be writing a Doctor Who spinoff, Class.

The movie based on his novel A Monster Calls (for which he wrote the screenplay) will be released in October 2016.


Young Adult

A Monster Calls [eBook] 

More Than This [eBook]

The Rest of Us Just Live Here [eBook, eAudio]

Chaos Walking Trilogy

The Knife of Never Letting Go [eBook, eAudiobook] 

The Ask and the Answer [eBook, eAudio], audiobook] 

Monsters of Men [eBook] 

Chaos Walking: The Complete Trilogy [eBook] 

Adult

The Crane Wife [eBook]

 

Get in the Game: Read!/¡Entra en el Juego: Lee!

Today kicks off our Summer Reading Program! From June 4 through July 16, visit any Public Library of Albuquerque and Bernalillo County to sign up and get a reading log. Our Summer Reading Program is for all ages--kids, tweens, and teens can receive weekly prizes for reading, and adults can enter into weekly prize drawings, as well as grand prize drawings at the end of the summer.

You can also participate in our passport program; for every five library branches you visit, get an entry form for a prize drawing. And, as we've done in the past, we have great programs happening for all ages this summer.

For more details about the Summer Reading Program and for information about the different events we'll have throughout the summer, visit our Summer Reading Program website.

When I talk to people about our Summer Reading Program, I get a lot of questions: What counts as reading? Who can participate? Is it just for kids? What if a child can't read yet? If you have similar questions, here are some ways you can participate.

Adults

It can be hard to find time to read, but adults read more often than they think. Aside from traditional print books and ebooks, here are some ways to get your summer reading hours:

• Audiobooks
• Magazines and newspapers
• Graphic novels and comic books
• Blogs
• Online articles (news articles or other articles)

Babies and Kids

Is your child not reading on their own yet? That's okay! Reading with your child or bringing your child to storytime counts!

Do you have a child who loves to read graphic novels and comic books? This counts, too! Kids are always surprised when I tell them that graphic novels and comic books count as reading.

Do you have a child who loves to participate in the library's Read to the Dogs program? If so, make sure they mark it down on their reading log!

Teens

Sometimes, teens are a bit harder to reach. When I was a teen, I didn't read as much as I did when I was a kid. Comic books, graphic novels, manga, magazines, and blogs and other online articles all count for teen reading!

The key thing to remember with summer reading is it's supposed to be fun. If you're reading or listening to a book you enjoy, or a newspaper or magazine, or a blog or online article, you're doing it right. And if you're reading this summer, we want to see you, so make sure you stop by, sign up, and tell us about what you're reading!

The Secret Lives of Housewives

It’s a wonder that anyone has the nerve to write about housewives at all anymore: Not only are these women bored, but they have been universally declared boring. Yet last year saw the publication of Hausfrau, an acclaimed novel by the poet Jill Alexander Essbaum about a disconsolate American woman languishing in her husband’s stifling hometown in Switzerland, and this month brings American Housewife, a short story collection by Helen Ellis. Add to that Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation, a 2014 novel that, while not technically about a housewife, wrestles with the same conflict between family life and self-determination, and it’s clear that the theme is enjoying a minirevival of sorts.
~Laura Miller, "Ladies of Leisure"

Novels featuring housewives as protagonists first burst on the scene in the 1960s-70s, with memorable opuses including Susan Isaacs' Compromising Positions, Judy Blume's Wifey and Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, the latter two first novels for both authors (in Blume's case, her first novel for adult readers). Some of these early novels were sexy, some were polemics, but they definitely had a different take on the "suburban malaise" of earlier novels by their male counterparts featuring housewives, such as Revolutionary Road or Rabbit, Run. This was also the era that Erma Bombeck began publishing her "At Wit's End" columns, which took a humorous look at the lives of wives and mothers.

But, since them, we have had Desperate Housewives and Real Housewives of several different locales, and novels about lives in suburbia have become more twisted - or their secrets and controversies are more exposed, including vigilantes (Tom Perrotta's Little Children), familial doom (Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides), brutal murder (Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones),  deception (Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl), and wife-swapping (Rick Moody's The Ice Storm).

We've compiled for you a list of fictional housewives with all sorts of adventures and dilemmas: in a "quirky ode to love, fate, and hair metal"*; trying to fit in in a seaside village with a soap-selling mafia; trapped in what looks like a picture-perfect marriage; after the end of marriage, trying to make ends meet in a dodgy apartment-sitting situation; dealing with family secrets coming to a head; meeting a celebrity crush who changes everything; even a 35-year friendship that becomes a writers' circle. Being a housewife is not a quiet or uncomplicated life! As Helen Ellis said on Twitter, in her housewife persona (her handle is WhatIDoAllDay, and she regards her feed as an online "cocktail party"), “I’m not bored, I’m lying in wait."

My Year of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki
 
Love May Fail by Matthew Quick [eBook]

Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector
(particularly the stories from the collection Family Ties)

Housewitch by Katie Schickel  

The Hummingbird's Cage by Tamara Dietrich 

The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer

Vintage by Susan Gloss

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel

Plastic by Christopher Fowler

The Obituary Writer by Ann Hood

Hush Little Baby by Suzanne Redfearn

Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories by Lucia Perillo
(particularly stories such as "Dr. Vicks", "Anyone Else But Me", and "Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain")

Don't Tell Alfred by Nancy Mitford [eBook]

How To Be an American Housewife by Margaret Dilloway

The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale [eAudiobook]

The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton [eBook]

The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth J. Church   

The Longest Night by Andria Williams

The Expatriates by Janice Y. K. Lee

           

For more titles starring housewives, try a subject search!

*from the library catalog