Update on 2025 Library Usage

By Audrey Estebo, Library Committee

"Why can’t people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?” --David Baldacci, The Camel Club

Who knew that David Baldacci, the author of more than fifty thrillers, would be the one to speak to the world we find ourselves in today. Perhaps Coffman has taken his words to heart. We had another busy year in the Library, with many residents reading our books and being nice to one another. 

In 2025, we added approximately 225 books to our collection, including 40 BookFest books, more than 25 Book of the Month purchases, and more than 150 donations, the lifeblood of our collection. Residents checked out 1,171 books in 2025, down a bit from 2024 when the total was 1,307. Over 70 percent of the units checked out a book—a great usage rate. Women checked out more books than men (90 percent

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vs 10 percent), a change from the past two years when women made up 80 percent of all checkouts.

Our reading habits stayed steady. Fiction made up 40 percent of all loans, and mystery/thriller followed closely with 37 percent. Biography and memoir were 6 percent, and history was 4 percent. Poetry and nature/science were each 2 percent.

Our most borrowed book was Louise Penny’s 2025 title, Grey Wolf. Among non-mystery fiction, our top choices were Orbital by Samantha Harvey and James by Percival Everett.

Our most borrowed author was Minnesotan William Kent Krueger, with thirteen of his books checked out a total of thirty-six times. Krueger, who has twenty-five titles on our shelves, has been our most popular author for four of the last five years, coming in second only in 2021 when Louise Penny won the honor. Krueger is one of several mystery/ thriller authors whose back lists are very popular at Coffman. Among them are Donna Leon (13 books checked out), Louise Penny (7), and Mick Herron (7). Most popular non-mystery fiction authors are Louise Erdrich (7) and Ann Patchett (5).

Not all readers were looking for today’s best sellers. Brontë, Wharton, Austen, Cather, Twain, and Fitzgerald were all read. Classic mystery writers also made their appearances: March, Christie, Sayers, James, and Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall.

Our nonfiction reading ranged from the very popular The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, to Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux.

​If you are a regular at our library, keep reading. If you aren’t, stop by, browse, pick up a title from a favorite author or a new-to-you author, and settle in. Maybe if, along with those individual acts of advocacy we chose to engage in, we all just spend a little more time sitting and reading books, we can help make the world a better place.