Today’s Tuesday Thingers question is:What’s the most popular book in your library? Have you read it? What did you think? How many users have it? What’s the most popular book you don’t have? How does a book’s popularity figure into your decisions about what to read?

Can we just skip the Harry Potter books? There are so many of those on the lists that it’s just no fun.

Harry Potter aside, the most popular book in my library is The Hobbit, with 21,347 copies. Oddly enough, the second most popular is The Lord of the Rings (15,497), a “book” which doesn’t actually exist – that’s the name of the series, not one of the books!

I have read The Hobbit and all of the Lord of the Rings books many, many times. They were constant friends in my childhood, the beginnings of my love of fantasy and adventure and travel. They were also the source of some great frustration, as there was a distinct shortage of interesting female characters to pretend to be as I was reading. (When I got a little older, that was mitigated by the wealth of interesting male characters to fall in love with.)

The most popular book I don’t have is The DaVinci Code. I read it when it came out, thought it was a fairly fun mystery/thriller, but I never really got what all the fuss was about. It was a good read, certainly nothing to form a cult over!

Popularity probably has something to do with whether or not a book comes to my attention, but I won’t generally read something just because it’s popular. There are so many interesting books waiting for my attention that I just don’t have the time to spare.