Reading Tastes

 

London Public Library
   I received on Dec.16, from the LPL a list of the "25 most-borrowed Books of 2025". It came under the heading, "Best Books of 2025" and the sub-heading, "This Year's Hottest Books" and I will add that apparently these are "The Most Popular Books" requested by borrowers this year. (I discussed the issue of "good books" and "popular books" in: A Branch Library For Good Books. )
   What I noticed was the large number of readers waiting for books and the large number of books that have to be ordered. It appears that around 500 copies of these 25 books were purchased and that was really not enough to satisfy the demand. (These would include books in a various formats - print, large print, e-books and audio ones.) All of this translates into a considerable amount of work that has to be done by librarians, and the people delivering your "Hold" to the library of your choice. 
  I admit that I don't follow popular reading trends or authors (who are excluded here from my cut & paste job), but I did notice that a few of the books were featured on Oprah and Reese's Book Clubs, which probably accounts for some of the popularity. Fiction (F) appears to be more popular than non-fiction (N) and there are more women authors than men. (I had to check and learned that both Taylor Jenkins Reid and Mel Robbins are female.) When checking, I learned that Mel, the author of ,The Let Them Theory is also the author of The 5 Second Rule and The High 5 Habit, while Taylor also has produced some titles with numbers, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & the Six. What this all means, I am not sure, but if you aspire to be a popular author, perhaps you should include a number in the title. As for titles, I think that, The Book Club for Troublesome Women..." is a clever one, which is likely to be chosen by many book clubs.

   Two of the non-fiction titles are about food and another is by our Prime Minister. I was surprised by the "Tuberculosis" title, but learned that the author is also a popular Y.A. novelist.
    One of the fictional works is by an author who lives in London, but has an international following. 

   Below this list, you will find another, indicating what they are reading, or waiting to read in Toronto.  (My apologies for the wobbly columns.)

                                                                                   HOLDS COPIES Alchemised (F) 80      10 All the Way to the River Love, Loss, and…(N)   75        12 Atmosphere a love story (F)    148         26 A truce that is not peace (N)    35        13 Careless people a cautionary tale of power…(N)    28         13 Don't let him in (F) 80 39 Every salad ever : from grains to greens…(N)…. 81 18 Everything is tuberculosis the history and (N) 51 7 Great big beautiful life (F) 70 30 Hello, Juliet (F) 2 15 Katabasis a novel (F) 28 13 Mother Mary comes to me (N) 88 12 My friends a novel (F) 162 25 Nightshade a novel (F) 26 25 One day, everyone will have always been against (N) 35 10 One golden summer (F) 57 27 She didn't see it coming (F) 116 25 The book club for troublesome women a novel(F) 51 11 The essential cottage cookbook simply delicious…(N) 11 8 The let them theory a life-changing tool that …(N) 126 40 The Paris Express a novel (F) 122 31 The river is waiting a novel (F) 176 25 The tenant (F) 17 23 Value(s) building a better world for all (N) 53 13 Whistle a novel (F) 0 22   

Toronto Public Libraries
   The TPL list is under the title, "What Toronto Read in 2025." It includes only the Top 10, and shows that almost 3000 copies of just those 10 books were ordered. Fiction is again more popular and it is noted that: "Torontonians went genre hopping: fantasy (Onyx Storm), romance (Great Big Beautiful Life), thriller (The God of the Woods), dark humour (The Wedding People), historical fiction (The Women) and literary fiction (Intermezzo). Nonfiction hits (The Let Them Theory, Atomic Habits, The Anxious Generation) show a desire for self-improvement and calm amid modern life’s stresses. Together, these titles were borrowed over 195,000 times.

 

                                                                               Holds      Copies

1. Onyx Storm (F) 84 191

2. The Let Them Theory (N) 851 333

3. The Women (F) 197         221
4. The Wedding People (F) 247 189

5. The God of the Woods (F) 310 146
6. Great Big Beautiful Life (F) 127 286
7. Funny Story (F) 100 192
8. Atomic Habits (N) 476    210

9. Intermezzo (F) 167 369

10. The Anxious Generation (N) 209 193

New York Public Libraries Here are the most checked out books in New York City and Mel is again the author of one of them.

1.James by Percival Everett

2.The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

3.Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros

4.Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

5.All Fours by Miranda July

6.The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About by Mel Robbins

7.Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros

8.The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

9.Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

10. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver The Bonus

I had never heard of Ms. Yarros, but learned this: "She is best known for the Empyrean fantasy book series, which will be adapted into a television series with Amazon; Yarros will serve as a non-writing executive producer. In July 2023, Waterstones indicated that it became the "fastest selling pre-order title in a single day on [the] website with [the] special edition selling out in just seven hours".The third book, Onyx Storm, was released in 2025. Yarros has indicated that the series will ultimately include five books." Don't begrudge her popularity. I also learned this: "Rebecca Yarros is disabled. She has hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS), which causes chronic pain, joint instability, and other connective tissue-related challenges."

U.S Bestsellers - 100 Years Ago

1925

Source:

Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller, 1900-1999. Michael Korda, p.49.

Rambling in America

   From the title you might assume that this post is about one of the many speeches given recently by President Trump. That is not the case. Instead, I am offering a suggestion for a book to read, once the weather turns. If the weather had not been so good for so long, I had planned to review the book myself, but will now provide remarks and reviews by others since we are about to leave for a few weeks in British Columbia and the weather is still too nice to be blogging. 

Walking From Washington, D.C. to New York City

   Here is how it begins:

  "Our house stands along a row of white maples nine blocks east of the U.S. Capitol, as it has since Ulysses Grant was president. Tens of thousands of times in our twenty-two years there I have opened the wrought-iron gate between the garden and the sidewalk for trips to work, dog walks, early runs, quick jaunts to the store for a clutch of bananas, or with daughters in hand on Christmas morning.
   This trip was different. On a fresh morning in late March, I stepped past the threshold of our front door, tugged the garden gate closed behind me, and set off to walk to the city of New York. A slow stroll, I liked to say, down a fast lane. An easy walk along a founding swath of the country that most travelers want to put behind them....No hastening anything on this trip. I wanted nothing over. I kissed my wife, Shailagh; said goodby to my brother Jeff; scratched my Airedale behind the ear; and turned north. I was off to talk to America, to listen to her, to examine her, to wonder over her, at what we all hoped was the end of one of the roughest patches in our history. I wanted to think about what we are, and once were, and still yearned to be. To poke among the graveyards of our past and brush the moss off forgotten things. To chew over this American project and come to some hazy conclusion over whether America was still possible or had seen its best days."

   As the author acknowledges, the walk from downtown D.C. to Manhattan is not a difficult one and anyone familiar with the general area would likely choose to ramble around just about anywhere else in the U.S. For example, although the title of Chapter 21 seems promising -- "Cresting the Great Mound" -- it is about climbing the Edgeboro Landfill in New Jersey. And, even though the author offers again a warning that much of the walk will be about wandering through a wilderness of warehouses, rather than the other kind, it is still a journey you should take with him.

   "There's nothing heroic about walking to New York, It is a humdrum feat by any measure. It is no trail through Appalachia to the peaks of Maine. No Everest looms along the way to surmount. No Grand Canyon to get across. No Cyclops to gobble me while sailing home from Troy. No Amazon requiring a machete in the belt for vines or snakes, No warlords or highwaymen along the way to loot one's knapsack. The gravest threat was a driver looking at his phone."

Believe the Blurbs

"This is a near perfect book, an exquisitely seen and felt memoir of an American journey; it's not just a geographic journey, full of keen observations and thoughtful insights, but a spiritual one, finding in our complex and sometimes contradictory landscape a mirror in which King's own inner life awakens as he wanders. Amazing."

— Ken Burns

"Part travelogue, part history, American Ramble is a thoughtful, warm-hearted guide to the country that we’ve inherited and that we’re making." — Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction

"A 61-year-old journalist, recovering from cancer, sets out to walk from Washington, D.C. to New York City. Where we might see monotony and sprawl, overpasses and rest stops, he finds time and nature, humankind in all its variety, and even, at moments, rapture. Go with Neil King on this fascinating, enchanting, and rewarding journey." — Evan Thomas, author of the New York Times bestselling First: Sandra Day O’Connor and Being Nixon.

"Beautifully written, American Ramble is packed with keen observations, surprising discoveries, and wise reflections. Readers will be rewarded at every turn in the road. It is a journey both through a landscape most of us never see and through the tangles of America’s history. It is also about perseverance and renewal. Neil King is a gifted writer, and this book is a gift." — Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Prize and The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations.

Sources:
   Reviews are easily found and always adulatory. The book is readily available and for those in London, copies are found in the London Public Libraries. 
   Unfortunately, King had been diagnosed and treated for cancer before the walk and did not live long after it. Here are two obituaries.

"Neil King Jr., Who Wrote of a Long Walk of ‘Renewal,’ Dies at 65," Trip Gabriel, NYT, Sept. 27, 2024.

   "Neil King Jr., a journalist whose book, “American Ramble,” told of his 330-mile trek from his home in Washington, D.C. to New York City while in remission from cancer, an account that lyrically evoked the people, history and back roads of the Mid-Atlantic region, died on Sept. 17 in Washington. He was 65.

   Mr. King’s travelogue-cum-memoir, whose subtitle is “A Walk of Memory and Renewal,” was based on a 26-day hike he began in late March 2021, when the country was emerging from the Covid lockdown. (He modestly called it a “humdrum feat by any measure.”) It crystallized for many readers how the pandemic had heightened a sense of life’s urgency and fragility."

   "Neil King Jr., Who Walked the Byways on His ‘American Ramble,’ Dies at 65," Washington Post, Sept. 20, 2024.
   "The idea for his ramble germinated over decades, fed by his fascination with history and inspired by the treks of other writers such as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s hike through Europe in 1933 recounted in “A Time of Gifts” (1977) and Bruce Chatwin’s travels in Australia’s Outback in “The Songlines” (1987).

   Then, over a few turbulent years, Mr. King felt a deep urgency to make his journey. He had bounced back after cancer surgery but knew there were risks that the disease could return. The pandemic lockdowns amplified the pull of the road, he said. And the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by supporters of President Donald Trump left Mr. King wanting to observe America’s deep political fissures from the modest vantage point of a lone wanderer.

“I had set out with a wonder first stirred by a sickness,” he wrote. “A jolt of fear had opened a seam of freedom, and I had slipped through. I went out to seek and give meaning, with the giving being a key part of that conversation.”

 On March 29, 2021, Mr. King slipped on his gray-and-green backpack, put on his tweed cap, gave one last stretch to his lanky 6-foot-5 frame and walked down the front steps of his Capitol Hill townhouse."

Telegraph Cove

Telegraph Creek
   Careful readers will notice the slight difference between the title of this post and the subtitle right above. Unfortunately, Telegraph Cove, which is on Vancouver Island, caught fire early in this new year. The cove is likely okay, but the very small community lost most of its buildings and the fire, on a much smaller scale, was as devastating as the one much farther down the coast in California. 

   Reading about Telegraph Cove reminded me of Telegraph Creek, which is located far away from the Pacific in the northern B.C. interior. They both exist because of attempts to establish telegraph lines, but the former attracts tourists, while the latter has not seen much activity since the Gold Rush. 
  It was the lack of activity and its remoteness that lured Edward Hoagland to visit Telegraph Creek in the mid-1960s and it remains a place that is not easy to get to. The result was this book which is the reason for this post: NOTES FROM THE CENTURY BEFORE: A JOURNAL FROM BRITISH COLUMBIA.

  I have just re-read the book and recommend it to you. But not if you are the type who gets too upset reading about what it took (and still takes) to survive in the wild, deep in B.C. I will not try to convince you that it is a fine book, but simply provide you with the remarks of those whose literary endorsement you are much more likely to respect.
   Using "blurb' in the British sense, as an advance recommendation from someone well-known, can you find me a book that has better ones than these? 

Source: 
  Articles about the fire will be found in early January, 2025. The picture of it above is from: "Fire Destroys Buildings, Parts of Historic Boardwalk in Vancouver Island's Telegraph Cove, CBC News, Dec. 31, 2024. 
  The cover of the book and the blurbs are from the 1969 Random House edition. 

Post Script: 
  I am assisting in providing care for an old professor. Years ago when the name "Edward Hoagland" came up, he told me a story about Hoagland who was staying close by in Barton, Vermont. I think it had something to do with him coming by to use the facilities. I just went to see the professor after reading the book and again mentioned Hoagland. His eyes brightened, but unfortunately he can no longer communicate and I will never know what he had to say about meeting Hoagland.