Loan Stars is the readers’ advisory tool that allows library staff across Canada to collaboratively select their favourite forthcoming titles. Using CataList, the online catalogue service and order management tool available for free to libraries, library staff can endorse the Fiction, Non-Fiction, Juvenile, and Young Adult titles they want to recommend to their patrons. The titles with the most recommendations become Loan Stars picks!
Join us as we go back in time and recap what happened in the Loan Stars world in fall 2020 (click here to see the full lists by month).
Library circulation
Thanks to LibraryData, BookNet’s national library collection and circulation analysis tool, we were able to determine which of the 30 books on the three lists were the most popular among library patrons from their publication dates up until Jan. 17, 2021.
These are the results:
The Searcher by Tana French (October 2020 Adult list)
Confessions on the 7:45: A Novel by Lisa Unger (October 2020 Adult list)
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab (October 2020 Adult list)
Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman (October 2020 Adult list)
The Kingdom by Jo Nesbo (November 2020 Adult list)
If I Knew Then by Jann Arden 🍁 (October 2020 Adult list)
The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow (October 2020 Adult list)
Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline (November 2020 Adult list)
Extraordinary Canadians by Peter Mansbridge 🍁 (November 2020 Adult list)
Lazarus by Lars Kepler (December 2020 Adult list)
Subject popularity
When comes to popularity, Fiction takes the crown as the subject category with the biggest presence in these three Adult Loan Stars lists — 19 out of 30. The remaining books fall into the Biography and Autobiography subject category (4), Social Science (2), Poetry (2), True Crime (1), Music (1), or Cooking (1).
Given its popularity, we were also interested in breaking down the Fiction category by subject. We found out that six of the 19 Fiction titles are Thrillers, three are Literary titles, Science Fiction and Fantasy were tied — two titles for each category — and all the remaining categories, Women, Romance, Mystery & Detective, Horror, and Crime had one title present across all three lists.
Repeat authors
Of the 30 authors whose titles were Loan Stars picks this season, nine had been featured on a previous Loan Stars list!
The authors previously included (and the titles that got them on the list):
Tana French’s The Witch Elm was on the October 2018 list and the Best of the Brightest 2018 list
V.E. Schwab’s A Conjuring of Light was on the February 2017 list
Alice Hoffman’s Rules of Magic was on the October 2017 list and Faithful was on the November 2016 list
Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth was on the April 2018 list
Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January was on the September 2019 list
Andre Alexis’s 🍁 The Hidden Keys was on the September 2016 list
Margaret Atwood’s 🍁 The Testaments was on the September 2019 list and the Best of the Brightest 2019 list and Hag-Seed was on the October 2016 list
Genevieve Cogman’s Mortal World was on the November 2018 list
Christopher Golden’s Hex Life was on the 2019 October list
Canadian 🍁 contributors
We also looked at the number of Canadian contributors present in these three lists. (For reference: A Canadian Contributor is an author, illustrator, translator, or editor who is a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident of Canada.) Of all 30 titles included in the October, November, and December Adult lists, only 30% were by Canadian contributors.
ICYMI, these are the titles that made it to the lists
October Loan Stars Adult list
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab (Tor/Forge)
Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman (Simon & Schuster)
The Searcher by Tana French (Viking)
The Night Piece by Andre Alexis 🍁 (McClelland & Stewart)
The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow (Orbit)
Baking Day with Anna Olson by Anna Olson 🍁 (Appetite by Random House)
Confessions on the 7:45: A Novel by Lisa Unger (Park Row Books)
Black Matters by Afua Cooper 🍁 and Wilfried Raussert (Fernwood Publishing)
Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories: The Early Years by Michael Posner 🍁 (Simon & Schuster)
If I Knew Then by Jann Arden 🍁 (Knopf Random House)
Find all these titles in this CataList catalogue.
November Loan Stars Adult list
Little Cruelties by Liz Nugent (Simon & Schuster)
Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline (Ballantine Books)
Joni Mitchell Backstage Pass by Michael A O'Neill 🍁 (Danann Books)
Agatha Arch is Afraid of Everything by Kristin Bair (Alcove Press)
The Kingdom by Jo Nesbo (Random House Canada)
Dearly by Margaret Atwood 🍁 (McClelland & Stewart)
This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing by Jacqueline Winspear (Soho Press)
Extraordinary Canadians by Peter Mansbridge 🍁 (Simon & Schuster)
Find all these titles in this CataList catalogue.
December Loan Stars Adult list
Relax, Dammit! by Timothy Caulfield 🍁 (Allen Lane)
The Dark Archive by Genevieve Cogman (Ace)
Lazarus by Lars Kepler (McClelland & Stewart)
Red Hands by Christopher Golden (St. Martin's Press)
Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo (Seal Press)
The Last Days of John Lennon by James Patterson with Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge (Little, Brown and Company)
Perestroika in Paris by Jane Smiley (Knopf)
The Wrong Family by Tarryn Fisher (Graydon House)
Layla by Colleen Hoover (Montlake)
You’ve got the power!
Are you a Canadian library staffer? If so, you can participate in the Loan Stars program, too. Recommending books is easy, we walk you through the steps here, and if you have questions, please send them our way!
Be the hero — help fellow library staffers discover books you think are essential for Canadian libraries and library patrons.
How to use CataList reports to keep track of new drop-in titles and changes to key elements that publishers make to their forthcoming titles.