What Toronto Read, Watched and Listened To in 2017

The Most-Read Books Across Toronto, 2017

Select the book cover to see more information about the book and place a hold.

Books represented in the map, from left to right and top to bottom: The Couple Next Door, Animal Farm, The Twenty-Three, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Alchemist, The Girl on the Train, The Whistler, The Wrong Side of Goodbye.

At Toronto Public Library, we really like maps. So when we saw this literary map of the world by Reddit user Backforward24, our first thought was: how would Toronto look decked out in all of its favourite reads? We calculated the most-borrowed book for nearly two dozen loosely defined neighbourhoods across the city, and came up with the map you see above.

And it was an eye-opening exercise: we didn’t realize how handily last year’s multiple award-winner Do Not Say We Have Nothing would dominate the city; we knew Toronto liked thrillers, but boy does Toronto like thrillers! And we’re happy to see so many teens using the library to further their literary educations (as well as to build robots, learn leadership skills, and put on mind-blowing spoken word performances).

We also wanted to know what the most popular reads were for the city as a whole. To find out the top ten most-borrowed items for all of Toronto, read on:

Top Ten Lists:

These are the books practically everyone borrowed this year – the ones we couldn’t keep on the shelves. Some of them were new, and some of them showed remarkable staying power. Looked at together, they paint a picture of a city striving to understand the larger world with all its complexity: looking for order, looking for meaning, looking for self-understanding and self-improvement… and looking for thrills.