For those susceptible to moral panic, the list of 2013-14’s most borrowed books can’t fail to suggest once again an alarming public craving for murder and mayhem. But that’s not the only way of looking at it: the dominance of thrillers and detective fiction could instead be ascribed to a healthy need (always liable to be greater in times of recession, terrorist violence or mass paranoia) for narratives in which broken communities are repaired thanks to a sleuth’s intelligence, or threats to terrified ones are eliminated after a long ordeal because of a hero’s courage and combat skills.
Library users clearly prefer these communities to be safely far away, however; usually in US cities or suburbs, but the chart’s No 1, Dan Brown’s Inferno, takes place in Italy, while Private Down Under (5), the ill-advisedly named leading title from James Patterson’s fiction factory, unfolds in Australia. As a result Mark Billingham’s The Dying Hours (10) is the only UK-based novel in the top 20, since Lee Child, also British, sets his Jack Reacher thrillers in the US.
Once you get past the all-conquering output of Jeff Kinney, the US creator of the Wimpy Kid (above) – two entries in the overall top 10, and six of the seven most borrowed kids’ titles – our children’s authors put up much more of a fight than their adult counterparts. Julia Donaldson and David Walliams both have several books in a top 100 titles’ list noticeably lacking Kinney’s compatriots such as Suzanne Collins, Rick Riordan or Lemony Snicket; and while the most borrowed authors rankings (where productivity – and hence lots of books on library shelves – is key) are topped by Patterson and his myriad co-writers for the eighth consecutive year, six of the top 10 places are occupied by British writers for children: Daisy Meadows (the Rainbow Magic team’s collective pseudonym), Donaldson, Francesca Simon, Adam Blade, Jacqueline Wilson and the big friendly ghost of Roald Dahl.
Compiled by Public Lending Right, which for 2013-14 awarded authors 6.66p per loan up to a cap of £6,600, the chart for individual titles is dominated by kids and crime. A complete genre duopoly is only prevented by the presence of Jamie Oliver (11), a handful of female commercial novelists, and the literary or literary-lite authors JK Rowling (17), Kate Atkinson (33), Maeve Binchy (40), Rachel Joyce (48), Khaled Hosseini (57) and Hilary Mantel (94).
Of the top 100 places, 99 are occupied by fiction, with Oliver’s tips on cheap meals the sole exception – so, as in previous years, the library chart offers a marked contrast in this respect to the sales charts, in which memoirs, cookbooks, annuals and manuals added up to around a third of the total. Why the bias towards fiction is so pronounced remains unexplained, but producers and lovers of non-fiction may at least find some patriotic solace for their gloom in PLR’s list of the most borrowed factual titles. It shows that while we may be addicted to lurid US thrillers, we prefer our cookery coaches (with Save with Jamie the genre’s most-borrowed book, Mary Berry the most-borrowed author) and autobiographers (Alex Ferguson, James Bowen) to be British and down to earth.
What’s also evident is that these borrowers mostly want books that teach them things – how to cook, drive (The Official DSA Theory Test – No 2 in factual most borrowed), become a UK citizen (the Home Office’s Life in the United Kingdom – No 3), be healthier. Those who read non-fiction for pleasure, or to learn more about something without a test to pass or problem to overcome, appear to be heavily outnumbered.
