Blog: Most cited books and other recommendations

Spring is coming this year even more quickly than usual. It's good to hide under a blanket and read books from snowdrifts and frost. To escape the cold, cold and dark world.

In the library's most borrowed books, women currently outrank men. That in itself is not a surprise, since the majority of our customers who borrow books are women. Among the writers, Christian Rönnbacka is currently the only one who gives women writers a hard time with his book Kostaja merkii, it is the number one list at the beginning of the year in our statistics. 

Other domestic works that are most quoted are Anu Joenpolvi's romantic Love and Hailstorms and Poutaa and Potato Flowers, Satu Rämön's Hildur and Outi Pakkanen's The Bottle Collector. Among foreign authors, several books by Elly Griffiths, Viveca Sten, Lucinda Riley and Nora Roberts collect plenty of quotes. In all its timelessness, Enni Mustonen's series Syrjästäkatsoja's stories still remains on the most quoted list, and among the men, Ilkka Remes and Tommi Kinnunen are lurking somewhere in the top-20.

War books, both novels and non-fiction, are still popular, even if they don't appear on the most quoted lists anymore. Among the most recent ones, I would like to recommend Aleksi Rikkinen's and Emil Kastehelm's book Sturmbock : a journey to Lapland's wartime fortifications, which tells about the defense line during the Lapland war, and Jari Lappalainen's novel The Fate of the Long-distance Scout, which tells the story of the tough Sissin Viljo Suokka's last remaining patrol trip in the fall of 1943. I can especially recommend it to those interested in long-distance scouting and intelligence activities more broadly. Mikko Porval's headquarters long-range patrol department Vehnäinäinen wrote a historical series of events, of which two parts have been published so far: Towards the East and Behind Syvärin takana.

Among the music books, the case of the year is without a doubt Kingston Wall's legacy written by Kimmo Aroluoma, which examines Petri Wall's musical heritage and the instruments he used with almost obsessive precision. Along with Aroluoma's work, you should also read an older book about Kingston Wall, Viljami Puustisen's Kingston Wall : Petri Wallin saaga. Recently published or soon to be published domestic musician books also include biographies of Kassu Halones, Kaija Koo and Kika, and of course Yari Knuutinen's autobiography Taikurin apulainen, known from the band Se.

Reserving new books has literally exploded in Heili libraries, and the waiting times for books can be long. In the library, we have a constant value discussion about how many individual works we can buy from any work. The Heili group, which has been operating for almost ten years, has of course changed the acquisition of material, because books move smoothly between municipalities. At some point, we made a decision to buy so-called hit books more abundantly than usual, so that customers would get them with less waiting time, but as a result, a year after the publication, these hit books were sitting on our shelves as useless pawns and a large part of them had to be removed. Removing books is as important a job as buying them, but we also feel bad about removing books that are only a few years old due to lack of space.

Library work is a constant tightrope dance between entertaining and civilizing. Do we want to offer the taxpayers what they want most, or do we want to act as the people's candles in the old model by acquiring a lot of material that has little circulation and also receives few citations. Some kind of balance between entertainment and education must always be found, and we library professionals are needed for that. 

mika. kahkonenimatra.fi
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