The Toronto Public Library’s most-borrowed books list has arrived
Romantasy takes the top spot once again
It’s hard to keep track of everyone’s riveting end-of-year lists, but at last, the one we’ve all been waiting for is finally here: the Toronto Public Library has revealed its most-borrowed books of 2025.
“Toronto’s reading list was as varied as the city itself,” said an introduction to the list, posted on TPL’s website. The top 10 titles were borrowed over 195,000 times—and no, the list does not include Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, which thousands of Torontonians patiently held their spots for in the library’s online queue, some for several years. (The TPL eventually added more copies.)
For the second year in a row, Rebecca Yarros’s romantasy hit Onyx Storm is the book Torontonians wanted to read more than any other, and on the flip side—from discovering magical powers to tolerating the harshest of realities—Mel Robbins’s Let Them Theory was right behind it.
Kristin Hannah’s The Women made the list again after being last year’s second-most-borrowed book, along with two Emily Henry novels and Sally Rooney’s latest.
The Wedding People by Alison Espach and Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods were also among the city’s most-read books, and to finish off the list, two self-help titles: Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and James Clear’s Atomic Habits, which seems to make the cut every year.
So many good books, so little time. It almost makes us appreciate the transit delays we endured in 2025—maybe the TTC makes us a little late so we can read more. That’s nice of them.
Related: The Toronto Reference Library’s new shopping bag exhibition is gloriously nostalgic
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
