The Ottawa Public Library (OPL) has released its most requested titles of 2024, an eclectic list reflecting the diverse tastes of local book borrowers.
Curated from the number of hold requests placed between Jan. 1 and Dec. 1, the library releases annual Top 10 lists of English and French titles, as well as lists of popular teen and children’s books.
This year’s most popular books feature more diverse settings compared to previous years, said Chris Simmons, the manager of content services for OPL.
“World War Two has been a very popular setting for a very long time … but you see different settings in some of these books,” he said.
Topping this year’s English list, for example, is The Women, a novel by American author Kristin Hannah about women and war. In the mid 1960s, 20-year-old protagonist Frances “Frankie” McGrath joins the Army Nurse Corps to follow her brother to Vietnam, before returning home from war to experience the tumult of a divided America.
In second place is Canadian author Louise Penny’s The Grey Wolf. Though it was only released at the end of October, the 19th instalment of the Armand Gamache mystery series was released to hot demand. The Insp. Gamache character has proved particularly popular with Ottawa borrowers for several years.
“Every city has its own reading tendencies,” Simmons observed.
Non-fiction titles ‘speak to people’s concerns and anxieties’
The English list includes two non-fiction titles, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt and Atomic Habits by James Clear, which Simmons said “speak to people’s concerns and anxieties.”
Haidt is a social psychologist who argues that smartphones and social media are rewiring young brains to create an epidemic of mental illness among children and teenagers.
“That’s sort of a looming crisis that a lot of parents are very concerned about,” Simmons said.
Simmons said concern over the effects of smartphones is also driving interest in Clear’s book on productivity, which also made 2023’s list.
“People know their lifestyle is becoming much more phone-based,” he said. “They’re looking to take back control of their habits.”
Seven of the authors in the Top 10 are women and three are men. Two Canadian authors made the cut: Penny and Carley Fortune, whose This Summer Will Be Different in fifth place has been described as “a sexy and dreamy summer romance novel” set on Prince Edward Island. (In contrast, eight of the 10 authors on the French-language list are Canadian.)
Different cities, different lists
Four of the Top 10 titles were also on the Toronto Public Library’s Top 10 list, which differs slightly in that it’s made up of the most read and borrowed books of the year, rather than those with the most hold requests.
Topping Toronto’s list are two books in The Empyrean series by Rebecca Yarros, a popular American writer in the “romantasy” genre. The series is shaping up to become a publishing sensation, with an estimated three million copies of the two books sold since The Fourth Wing was released in May 2023, followed by The Iron Flame that November. Book three, Onyx Storm, is scheduled to be released in January 2025.
Those novels landed just outside Ottawa’s Top 10, Simmons said.
“We do find that literary fiction is always very popular in Ottawa,” he said. “There is a demand in Ottawa for more difficult to read or more complex literary fiction.”
Here’s OPL’s full list of the Top 10 most requested titles in English for adults in 2024:
- The Women by Kristin Hannah
- The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny
- Funny Story by Emily Henry
- The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
- This Summer Will Be Different by Carley Fortune
- The Briar Club by Kate Quinn
- Atomic Habits by James Clear
- The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
- Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
- The Housemaid by Freida McFadden
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