Tag Archives: Adult Fiction

Top 10 Most Borrowed Titles at VPL in 2024

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As the cool air sets in and the holiday tunes chime, I’m getting rolled into the jolly holiday spirit like any other years. Indeed, this is the most wonderful season of the year. In our book industry, every year this time we reward talented authors with awards and celebrate the most popular titles in various forms. Hence, our Recommended Magazine team again reviewed our circulation statistics in the past 12 months and developed six top 10 lists to pay tribute to the authors (or editors) of the top borrowed titles. The following are the three books in the first places of our teen, adult, and children’s fiction and non-fiction physical book categories. If you want to find out all the books included in these top 10 lists, please go directly to the bottom of this post.

Book cover of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
Book cover of Happy Place
Book cover of Diary of a Wimpy Kid Wrecking Ball

But of course, while we totally respect the statistical data and are happy for the award-winning or top selling authors, we understand many gifted authors and their brilliant works won’t make those arbitrary spots – there is only one winner for most awards and limited mentions in any of the “top x” reading lists. Just like a sophisticated traveler would want to know the quaint, unique places outside of those top must-see sites in any city, I suspect you might be curious to know what are the notable works outside of our top 10 lists this year? (Ok, I know you can’t answer me, LoL) So, I’m taking this opportunity to share a few great works that didn’t make our top 10 lists. If you’re interested, please read on!

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The Booker Prize 2024

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Cover-image-for-book-Orbital-by-Samantha-Harvey

Greetings from incredibly busy Libraryland. Population: me. Do you ever feel like everything that could possibly be happening is actually happening? Well, I do. I know that’s not strictly the case, but it certainly feels like it. Before this devolves into “Dear Diary” territory, let’s move on to the subject of this blog post, which is the Booker Prize. The longlist was announced in the summer, followed by the shortlist in September, and last Tuesday the grand champion of them all was crowned victorious. Before we get into that, however, let’s go through the shortlist. I will highlight some of the more intriguing finalists (according to moi). They are all available in our collection, apart from one. First, a little backstory. The Booker Prize is awarded to fictional works written in English and published in the United Kingdom and/or Ireland. Its origins are tied to the Booker family, who have a long history of involvement in plantations and enslavement in Guyana. The Booker Prize website says that the current prize and its associated monetary award have no “financial” associations with the “Booker Group.” There is now a foundation that manages the contest, with the prize money sourced from a charity foundation called Crankstart, of all things. Despite the history of the award’s longtime sponsors, The Booker Prize has remained a fixture on the global literary scene, although particularly in the UK. Speculation about who will be on the longlist, who will be shortlisted, and who will take home the great and final trophy (I don’t know if there’s actually a trophy, I mean more in a figurative sense) occupies a big part of the media about literature there. One of my favourite YouTubers, Jen Campbell, usually posts a vlog (video blog) of her experience reading the longlist each year. An author herself, she crafts long, calming sojourns into her reading life in video format. Here’s this year’s video. I encourage you all to check her out, especially if you like watching vlogs. I myself am a big fan of the format and catching glimpses into other people’s lives. The authenticity of vloggers, as they’re called, is an illusion, that much one must know is true. However, there are degrees to artifice. The creators with the smallest degrees of noticeable artifice are the ones I certainly gravitate toward. Jen Campbell’s artifice in these vlogs must be negligible. It just has to be. But, without further adieu. The shortlist for 2024. For those curious about the longlist, you can find it here.

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An Archive of Librarian Lore

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multicolour-stack-of-books
Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash

A little while ago, my coworker Alison shared this list of top librarians in pop culture with the team and asked us who else we might add to it. Inspired by the resulting conversation, I thought I would compile everyone’s suggestions, along with my own, into a handy-dandy blog post on famous and infamous librarians, by librarians, as a sort of archive of librarian lore (hence the title).

(Shoutout to Adam, who has written about libraries already, actually! Our posts will therefore have some overlap…but can there possibly be too much said about this venerable profession? That’s a rhetorical question, and the answer is a cheerful ‘no’ from yours truly).

Before we dive into the list, let’s learn a bit about librarians and their libraries! So, what makes one a librarian, exactly? Do you need a degree? Technically, the answer is yes. To be a certified librarian you need to have completed a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science. But not-so-technically, and to the general public, a librarian is what you might call any library worker.

Who was the first librarian? No one knows for sure, but the Sumerians (our earliest known civilization) may have been the first peoples to “train clerks to keep records of accounts. ‘Masters of the books’ or ‘keepers of the tablets’ were scribes or priests who were trained to handle the vast amount and complexity of these records.” And a king of Assyria named Ashurbanipal may have been the first person to make librarianship an actual profession, when he created a library in his palace in Nineveh and then hired clerks to look after it.

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