Which Anthologized Writers and Books Get Checked Out Most Often From Seattle Public Library

Seattle Public Library is quietly doing something no other major library system in the United States does: it makes its anonymized, granular checkout data publicly available. That decision has opened the door to a rare and fascinating look at what people are actually reading, not what publishers sell or syllabi prescribe, but what library users choose to borrow over time.

Using this unusually rich dataset, researchers from the University of Washington set out to answer a deceptively simple question: among writers considered part of the modern American literary canon, who is actually being read the most?

To do that, they focused on a very specific group of authors: the 93 writers included in the post-1945 volume of The Norton Anthology of American Literature. This anthology is one of the most widely assigned textbooks in U.S. English and literature courses, making it a powerful force in shaping what counts as “important” American writing. By comparing Norton’s canon with real-world reading habits at Seattle Public Library, the researchers hoped to see how classroom prestige lines up with public interest.

A Massive Dataset With Real-World Messiness

Seattle Public Library’s checkout data spans nearly 20 years, from 2005 onward, and includes close to 50 million individual records. On paper, this sounds like a dream for researchers. In practice, it was a challenge.

A single book can appear in dozens of slightly different forms. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for example, may show up as “Beloved,” “Beloved (unabridged),” “Beloved: a novel,” or as part of an audiobook or ebook collection. Before any meaningful analysis could begin, the research team had to standardize titles, remove subtitles, normalize punctuation, and manually identify translations and duplicate entries.

Once that work was done, the scope of the project became clear. Across the 93 Norton-anthologized authors, the team identified 1,603 distinct works that had been checked out a total of 980,620 times over the past two decades. That number alone makes this one of the most detailed studies of public reading behavior ever conducted using library data.

The Most Frequently Checked-Out Authors

When the researchers ranked authors by total checkouts, the results were striking. The most borrowed writers were not necessarily those most emphasized in traditional literary criticism. Instead, science fiction and genre writers dominated the list.

The top 10 most-checked-out 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

Several patterns immediately stand out. Science fiction writers like Le Guin, Butler, Jemisin, and Philip K. Dick appear prominently, even though genre fiction has historically been marginalized in academic literary canons. At the same time, many of the most read authors are women and writers of color, including Black and Native American authors who were once excluded entirely from anthologies like Norton’s.

The Books Readers Borrow the Most

Looking at individual titles adds even more clarity. The top 10 most frequently checked-out books by these authors 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 number one title, Parable of the Sower, deserves special attention. Its popularity surged dramatically in 2024, the year in which the novel is set. That same year, Seattle Public Library selected the book for its Seattle Reads program, which encourages city-wide reading and discussion of a single title. Together, cultural relevance and institutional support created a major spike in readership.

Why Science Fiction Rises to the Top

One of the most notable findings of the study is the outsize popularity of science fiction and speculative fiction. Despite making up a relatively small portion of the Norton Anthology, these works are among the most frequently borrowed.

This reflects a broader shift in how readers engage with literature. Science fiction often addresses political, social, and ethical questions through imaginative frameworks, making it especially resonant in times of uncertainty. Writers like Butler, Le Guin, and Jemisin explore themes of power, climate, race, gender, and survival, topics that feel urgently relevant today.

Their strong presence in checkout data suggests that readers are drawn to books that help them think through the present by imagining different futures, even when those books once sat outside the literary mainstream.

How News and Cultural Events Shape Reading Habits

The researchers also tracked how external events influenced borrowing patterns. Film adaptations, for example, led to noticeable spikes in checkouts. James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk and Don DeLillo’s White Noise both saw increased readership following their screen adaptations.

The deaths of major authors also produced clear surges in interest. Works by Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth experienced renewed attention shortly after their passing. These moments often prompt readers to revisit or discover influential writers they may have missed earlier.

Library data makes these cultural waves visible in a way sales figures rarely can.

Why Library Data Matters More Than Sales Numbers

One reason this research is so valuable is that book sales data is notoriously difficult to access, especially for scholars. Publishers treat sales figures as proprietary information, leaving researchers with limited insight into actual reading behavior.

Library checkout data tells a different story. It captures community-level engagement, includes ebooks and audiobooks alongside print editions, and reflects readers who may not buy books at all. In this sense, libraries offer one of the most democratic measures of literary interest available.

Seattle Public Library stands out as the only U.S. system currently releasing this level of detailed, anonymized data, making it a crucial resource for understanding reading culture.

Rethinking the Modern American Canon

Perhaps the most meaningful takeaway from the study is what it reveals about the canon itself. For decades, literary scholars have debated how to diversify reading lists and anthologies. The SPL data suggests that readers have already moved ahead of those debates.

The authors people are actually borrowing most often include women, Black writers, Native writers, and genre authors who were once seen as peripheral. In practice, readers are shaping a canon that looks far broader and more inclusive than older academic models.

Rather than rejecting literary value, this shift suggests a redefinition of it, grounded in curiosity, relevance, and lived experience.

The Research Behind the Findings

The study was conducted by Neel Gupta, Melanie Walsh, and colleagues at the University of Washington and published in Anthology of Computers and the Humanities in 2025. Alongside the paper, the team created an interactive website that allows users to explore checkout trends by author, title, and year.

For anyone interested in how data, libraries, and literature intersect, this work offers a rare and revealing window into what Americans are truly reading.

Research paper: https://doi.org/10.63744/p6qph135jhy2