With figures compiled too late for EL James to make an impression, borrowers favoured homicide over hanky-panky
by: John Dugdale
"Has EL James done it again?" is what you inevitably wonder, when approaching the latest annual chart for UK library loans. "Did she dominate sales rankings as she did last year? Did library users show just as much appetite for porn as bookshop customers?"
A quick glance at the chart will show that the emphatic answers are no, no and no: not only is the Fifty Shades trilogy not at the top, it's nowhere – as are last year's other erotica hits. As a result, the borrowings table looks more blokeish and less sexy than the all-2012 sales chart, where the top 10 was female-dominated: overall, 65 of the authors of the 100 most-borrowed books are men.
Perhaps some librarians were reluctant to stock porn. The difference between buying (where titles can be acquired impersonally online) and borrowing (where users typically hand titles to librarians for checking out) might also offer a partial explanation.
The main factor, however, is presumably not primness or diffidence but the chart's timeframe. The table, compiled by PLR – which distributed a total of £6.4m to 23,190 authors for 2011/12, at a rate of 6.20 pence per loan – covers borrowings up to the end of June last year, leaving little time for James's books to make an impression after their publication in April.
So, instead of switching to sex and spanking in America, borrowers stuck with 50 shades of US murder. The kind of crime fiction consumed is disparate, as shown by the top two titles: 10th Anniversary (1) is part of the Women's Murder Club series – think Sex and the City, but with homicide not hanky-panky as the girls' shared interest – while Worth Dying For (2) is a macho novel featuring Lee Child's nomadic vigilante Jack Reacher. Yet the demand for a US setting is consistent.
Exclude Child, who is British but lives in America and sets his books there, and the highest-placed UK author of fiction for adults is Martina Cole (21). Thereafter, the union flag is waved only sporadically, with single entries for crime writers such as Val McDermid (24), Peter Robinson (28), Dick and Felix Francis (32) and Peter James (63).
In stark contrast, James Patterson – who oversees a multi-genre fiction factory producing eight or more new titles a year – takes a credit on 15 of the 60 crime novels or thrillers in the top 100, usually as co-writer. Underlining the Americanisation of a chart previously ruled by Catherine Cookson and Jacqueline Wilson, he thereby continued his six-year reign as most-borrowed author.
Although gore also scored with Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish library users, judging by broken-out top 10s for those countries that roughly correspond with the UK-wide picture, its appeal was not universal. Broadly speaking, the further north you go, the nastier the predominant reading matter borrowed, a pattern that might invite sociological, meteorological and even horological (fewer winter daylight hours) explanations.
In England's soft south, some regions departed radically from the nationwide preference for murder. London's top 10, for example, consists entirely of children's books (topped by three Jeff Kinney titles), as does most of the equivalent list for East Anglia, which was headed by Aliens Love Underpants!.
Overall, 11 children's titles made the top 100, with the children's laureate, Julia Donaldson, leading from the front with the ever-popular Gruffalo (6). For PLR, the good news story, at least partially offsetting the potentially depressing evidence of borrowers' ghoulishness, was the most borrowed authors rankings, where borrowing of multiple titles allowed Rainbow Magic creator Daisy Meadows (2), Donaldson (3), Francesca Simon (5), Wilson (6) and Mick Inkpen (9) to overleap crime-mongers placed higher in the most borrowed books list.
Children's writers performed even more strongly in the most borrowed classic authors chart, where Roald Dahl pipped Enid Blyton (though crustier chart-watchers might mentally disqualify them as classic – along with Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer – and so promote Charles Dickens from fifth to first). Borrowing of their books continues to rise, both numerically (81.8m children's fiction titles were borrowed in 2011/12) and as a proportion of all loans (now 37.4%, up from 35.9%).
It's surely no accident that the top-100 novel with the strongest literary credentials, Emma Donoghue's Booker- and Orange-shortlisted Room (79) concerns crime (it was inspired by the Josef Fritzl case). Of the few titles in the list that are not straightforwardly crime novels, kids' books, or love stories, many have thriller elements.
Donoghue apart, literary fiction is represented only by Kathryn Stockett (5), Maeve Binchy (10, 41), David Nicholls (42), Kate Atkinson (89) and Joanna Trollope (91), and whether some of those authors should be so classified is debatable. It's a markedly thinner showing than in 2010/11, when Stockett and Trollope were joined by Sebastian Faulks, Nick Hornby, Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters.
Non-fiction is once again wholly absent from the top 100, but the most-borrowed factual title was Bill Bryson's Home, followed by Kate McCann's Madeleine, Jamie's 30-Minute Meals, a guide to the driving theory test, and a stamp catalogue. Tony Blair, whose memoirs came 17th, perhaps surprisingly managed to beat Nigella Lawson, but in an especially quirky category chart the ex-PM was himself beaten by the Duchess of Devonshire.
from: Guardian
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