ManyHolds

The list of the titles with the most holds has shifted a great deal again. Jonathan Kellerman, Maeve Binchy and Tami Hoag are the authors in highest demand. All three are always popular--but not usually at the top of the list.

Of course, another way of looking at it is that we already have enough copies of a lot of the most popular authors' new books, so long waiting lists don't develop. Certainly compared to library systems in larger places we do very well. We try to keep it at five holds per copy, and buy more when we need to. (And are helped out by donated copies as people who absolutely can't wait buy the books, read them, and pass them on for the library's eager readers to enjoy.) In some places, libraries keep the ratio at 10 to 1 or even higher; and in very large systems people are always finding themselves #65 or #82 for the latest book by their favorite author. That only happened to us once--for The Da Vinci Code. This week, the top of the list is:

• Obsession / Jonathan Kellerman
• Whitethorn Woods / Maeve Binchy
• The alibi man / Tami Hoag
• The good husband of Zebra Drive / Alexander McCall Smith
• The secret / Rhonda Byrne
• The watchman : a Joe Pike novel / Robert Crais
• Harry Potter and the deathly hallows / J. K. Rowling
• Nineteen minutes / Jodi Picoult
• The measure of a man : a spiritual autobiograph / Sidney Poitier
• Blood and thunder : an epic of the American West / Hampton Sides
• Dust / Martha Grimes
• What the dead know / Laura Lippman
• I heard that song before / Mary Higgins Clark
• The road / Cormac McCarthy
• Step on a crack / James Patterson
• The God delusion / Richard Dawkins

The full list is always on the web page as Books You're Willing to Wait in Line For, and on the front page of the catalog as Current Popular Titles. At the moment it hasn't been updated--this is a good chance to see how the present list compares to the top of the one run at the beginning of the month.