Curious to know what books and authors Seattle-area residents have been reading the most in the past two decades? We now have a data-driven peek, thanks to researchers at the University of Washington who analyzed a zoomed-in sample size of checkout data from Seattle Public Library (SPL). They were able to do this because SPL is the only U.S. library system that makes its checkout data public (although the checkout data is anonymous). Since SPL’s checkout data set includes nearly 50 million rows, UW researchers decided to focus solely on the 93 authors included in a specific anthology.
Read on for all the details!
For this checkout analysis, UW researchers looked at the past 20 years of Seattle Public Library checkout data—but only for authors included in Volume E of The Norton Anthology of American Literature (1945 to the present). “We worked with the Norton anthology in part because it’s a small enough scale for us to handle,” explained lead author Neel Gupta, a UW doctoral student in the Information School. That’s why you won’t see many popular titles as The Hunger Games or Twilight ranked in this data, despite undoubtedly high demand. (That said, popular 2015 science fantasy novel The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin is included in the top 10!)
The anthology includes 1,603 works by 93 authors, which were checked out a total of 980,620 times since 2005. Some authors included in the anthology are Toni Morrison, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Junot Diaz, Alison Bechdel, George Saunders, Sherman Alexie, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, and Joan Didion.
The researchers found that, generally speaking, genre and sci-fi books were among the most popular. As you can see in the top 10 lists below, Ursula K. Le Guin was the #1 author and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower was the #1 book. (Butler was also the #2 author.) “Parable of the Sower” saw a huge spike in readership in 2024, which is the year the futuristic novel is set and the year SPL selected the novel for its Seattle Reads program. Gupta said that it was “striking to see that despite comprising a small portion of the anthology, these are the authors people are actually reading the most.”
The 10 top books were:
- “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler
- “Lincoln in the Bardo” by George Saunders
- “The Fifth Season” by N.K. Jemisin
- “The Sympathizer” by Viet Thanh Nguyen
- “Kindred” by Octavia E. Butler
- “Beloved” by Toni Morrison
- “The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Le Guin
- “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie
- “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion
- “The Sentence” by Louise Erdrich
The 10 top authors were:
- Ursula K. Le Guin
- Octavia E. Butler
- Louise Erdrich
- N.K. Jemisin
- Toni Morrison
- Kurt Vonnegut
- George Saunders
- Philip K. Dick
- Sherman Alexie
- James Baldwin
Although this is a very small sample size of SPL’s monumental checkout data, it is notable to see the diversity on display. Senior author Melanie Walsh, a UW assistant professor in the Information School, said:
I find it very beautiful that after years of these big debates about diversifying the canon, the works that people are turning to the most are by women and Black and Native writers, who previously were not even included in these anthologies.”
You can read more about the analysis via the news release on the University of Washington website, and you can also dive deeper into the data using this interactive explorer.