What did you read this past fall?
The Alexandria Library system shared its most-checked out books from mid-September through last week with ALXnow, with over a dozen fiction reads topping the charts. The library recorded a grand total of 1,811 check-outs of its top 20 titles during that period.
The library’s most-checked out title this past season was “The Women” by Kristin Hannah, a 2024 historical coming-of-age fiction read detailing the life of a woman in the United States Army Nurse Corps during the Vietnam War. It was checked out a total of 159 times across the library’s four main branches.
The No. 1 read was followed closely by “James: A Novel” by Percival Everett. It’s a story that writes back to Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” with a reimagined tale from the perspective of Jim, an enslaved man on a journey to freedom. Library-goers checked out the novel out 152 times.
Finally, the third most-checked out book in Alexandria this past fall was “The God of the Woods” by Liz Moore, a fictional mystery investigating a wealthy teenager’s 1970s summer camp disappearance in the Adirondack Mountains.
Alexandria’s readers have a taste for fiction. Nineteen of the library’s 20 top titles were classified as fiction (15), juvenile graphic fiction (three) or young adult fiction (one).
Just one nonfiction title made it in the top 20 books by check-out this past season, with 85 reservations: “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” by psychologist Jonathan Haidt.
This fall, kids were into graphic novels and “Sunrise on the Reaping”, a recently released prequel to the dystopian world of “The Hunger Games.” The following titles appeared among the top juvenile fiction and juvenile graphic fiction check-outs across the library’s four main branches.
- “Dog Man: Big Jim Begins” (102 checkouts)
- “Sunrise on the Reaping” (80 checkouts)
- “Dog Man: Grime and Punishment” (74 checkouts)
- “Escaping Peril: A Graphic Novel” in the “Wings of Fire” series (72 checkouts)
Data for all of 2025 was unavailable as the Alexandria Library recently switched catalog systems.
