Loan Stars Adult lists roundup: Fall 2020

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:

Collage of the book covers of the following books: The Searcher by Tana French, Confessions on the 7:45 by Lisa Unger, and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
  1. The Searcher by Tana French (October 2020 Adult list)

  2. Confessions on the 7:45: A Novel by Lisa Unger (October 2020 Adult list)

  3. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab (October 2020 Adult list)

  4. Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman (October 2020 Adult list)

  5. The Kingdom by Jo Nesbo (November 2020 Adult list)

  6. If I Knew Then by Jann Arden 🍁 (October 2020 Adult list)

  7. The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow (October 2020 Adult list)

  8. Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline (November 2020 Adult list)

  9. Extraordinary Canadians by Peter Mansbridge 🍁 (November 2020 Adult list)

  10. 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).

Bar chart of the subject popularity of titles included in Loan Stars lists during the fall in 2020.

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.

Popularity of subjects within the Fiction category.

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):

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.

 
Pie chart of the number of Canadian contributors present in the Fall Loan Stars lists.
 
 

ICYMI, these are the titles that made it to the lists

October Loan Stars Adult list

Find all these titles in this CataList catalogue.

November Loan Stars Adult list

Find all these titles in this CataList catalogue.

December Loan Stars Adult list

Find all these titles in this CataList catalogue.


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.

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