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Donna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch, was the most circulated book of 2014.
Donna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch, was the most circulated book of 2014.

The Library’s Top 15 of 2014 in Fiction, Mystery, and Nonfiction

Thursday, January 29, 2015

What follows are the most circulated books at the Library in 2014. You can revisit the most popular books of 2013 here.  

— Patrick Rayner & Steven McGuirl, Acquisitions Dept. / Bobbie L. Crow, Systems Dept.

Fiction

For the people who found themselves at number eighty (or worse) in line for The Goldfinch, it will come as no surprise that Donna Tartt’s blockbuster was the most circulated book at the Library in 2014. Our eleven copies went out more than 200 times. Tartt is joined on the list by several recognizable authors whose new books are always received with great anticipation among our readers and whose names frequently appear on these kinds of year-end lists. There are several new names too. Eleanor Catton, Jo Baker, and Jenny Offill are just some of 2014’s breakout stars. 

At first glance, these 15 novels seem to have little in common. They are set in locations spanning the world, taking place at different points of the last three centuries. While these fifteen novels may differ, it is worth noting that women wrote fourteen of them.

  1. Tartt, Donna| The Goldfinch
    The Signature of All Things
  2. Quindlen, Anna| Still Life with Bread Crumbs
  3. McDermott, Alice| Someone
  4. Catton, Eleanor| The Luminaries
  5. Gilbert, Elizabeth| The Signature of All Things
  6. Doerr, Anthony| All the Light We Cannot See
  7. Tan, Amy| The Valley of Amazement
  8. Kidd, Sue Monk| The Invention of Wings
  9. Bloom, Amy| Lucky Us
  10. Lahiri, Jhumpa| The Lowland
  11. Baker, Jo| Longbourn
  12. Korelitz, Jean Hanff| You Should Have Known
  13. Straub, Emma| The Vacationers
  14. Prose, Francine| Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1933
  15. Offill, Jenny| Dept of Speculation

Mysteries

If this Library was Hollywood, Donna Leon would be its most bankable star. Without fail, her novels featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti rocket to the very top of our most circulated lists.  2014 is no exception. By Its Cover is largely set in a library, where pages from rare books have been pilfered, perhaps giving our loyal patrons extra-incentive to read it. Leon’s entry wasn’t the only book-related mystery to make this list. The Accident, the newest thriller from Chris Pavone, follows a literary agent with a manuscript she wants to publish, but doing so would bring down some of the most powerful people in show business.

Authors have often adopted pen names to test the waters in the mystery genre. Carolyn Heilbrun writing as Amanda Cross and Gore Vidal writing as Edgar Box are but two examples. Sharp eyed readers might already have noticed a few more among our top fifteen. Robert Galbraith’s second mystery, The Silkworm, did very well with our readers, though perhaps not as well as “his” other books.  Maybe you’ve heard of them, they feature a boy wizard named Harry Potter – Galbraith is J.K. Rowling’s mystery alter ego. Following closely behind is Benjamin Black, pseudonym of John Banville, and his novel featuring Philip Marlowe called The Black-Eyed Blonde. And let’s not forget that Charles Todd’s novels are the effort of mother and son, Caroline and Charles Todd.

  1. Leon, Donna| By Its Cover
    Midnight in Europe
  2. Furst, Alan| Midnight in Europe
  3. Pavone, Chris| The Accident
  4. Todd, Charles| Hunting Shadows
  5. Silva, Daniel| The Heist
  6. Galbraith, Robert| The Silkworm
  7. Black, Benjamin| The Black-Eyed Blonde
  8. Connelly, Michael| The Gods of Guilt
  9. Rendell, Ruth| No Man’s Nightingale
  10. Harris, Robert| An Officer and a Spy
  11. Rankin, Ian| Saints of the Shadow Bible
  12. Grisham, John| Sycamore Row
  13. Coben, Harlan| Missing You
  14. Penny, Louise| The Long Way Home
  15. Iles, Greg| Natchez Burning

Nonfiction

Seven books appearing on the 2014 nonfiction list may be broadly classified as memoirs—vs. five in 2013—but they vary quite widely in their distinctive approaches to the genre. A couple of them resist easy categorization altogether. That said, the power of literature (both reading and writing) is a prominent theme within the self-told lives of four: Shteyngart, Patchett, Mead, and Rosenblatt. It’s no wonder they were so popular with our membership.

The rest of the books represent an intriguing mix of world and U.S. history, epic biography, war and espionage, and economics. The last, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, a rigorous, 700 page, university press examination of income distribution written by a French economist, was surely the surprise ‘hit’ of the year. If casual discussions at the Circulation Desk are any indication, Capital can likely also lay claim to the distinction of being the most-circulated but least-finished book on the list.

Many of the authors here are veterans, well-represented in the Library’s collection, but two works by relative newcomers, Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch and Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land, are the sole books by these authors in our stacks.

  1. Shteyngart, Gary| Little Failure: a MemoirThe Boy Detective
  2. Shavit, Ari| My Promised Land: the Triumph and Tragedy of Israel
  3. Fest, Joachim| Not Me: Memoirs of German Childhood
  4. Rosenblatt, Roger|The  Boy Detective: a New York Childhood
  5. Mead, Rebecca| My Life in Middlemarch
  6. Lewis, Michael| The Flash Boys: a Wall Street Revolt
  7. Goodwin, Doris Kearns| The Bully Pulpit:Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism
  8. Macintyre, Ben| A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal
  9. Patchett, Ann| This is the Story of a Happy Marriage
  10. Gates, Robert| Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War
  11. Piketty, Thomas| Capital in the 21st Century
  12. Anderson, Scott| Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East
  13. Bryson, Bill| One Summer: America, 1927
  14. Vaill, Amanda| Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War
  15. Chast, Roz| Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

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