By Tim Spalding in Top Titles
August 13, 2026
Kathryn Stockett’s The Calamity Club—her first novel since 2009’s The Help—reached the top spot in July, its third month on the list. Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden held at number two, while Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, number one the past two months, slipped to third. Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent, which led the list from January through March, remains in the top five.
The oldest title on the list, by at least twenty-seven centuries, is Homer’s Odyssey, which details the travels and return of the Greek hero Odysseus from Troy. Christopher Nolan’s film version, with Matt Damon as Odysseus, opened July 17, ginning up interest in the original. (See From Screen to Shelf: How Movies and TV Shows Drive Library Patron Interest for other examples of this effect.)
We don’t usually dwell on editions in our “Top Titles” posts, but readers approached the Odyssey, which was written in Ancient Greek poetry, in versions by more than a dozen translators, and the film revived discussion about the best one. Nolan himself credited Emily Wilson’s fresh and spare 2017 translation as his inspiration, but many readers favor older versions by Robert Fagles (1996), Robert Fitzgerald (1961) or others, as well as a more recent translation by Daniel Mendelsohn (2025). So we pulled all the editions, found out the translators, and did the math:
| Translation | Percent |
|---|---|
| Emily Wilson (2017) | 43.4% |
| Daniel Mendelsohn (2025) | 16.2% |
| Robert Fagles (1996) | 13.3% |
| Robert Fitzgerald (1961) | 5.2% |
| George Herbert Palmer (1891) | 4.2% |
| Samuel Butler (1900) | 3.3% |
| Alexander Pope (1726) | 2.8% |
| Richmond Lattimore (1965) | 2.1% |
| Other | 9.5% |
For her part, Emily Wilson was no great fan of the film, writing in the London Review of Books:
“It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”
Several titles enter the list on the strength of recent releases. Daniel Silva’s Ransom, his latest Gabriel Allon novel, begins with the disappearance of a British socialite on vacation. James Patterson and Mike Lupica’s The Country Road Murders follows a former football star who returns to his North Carolina hometown. In Lisa Jewell’s It Could Have Been Her, a lost dog leads a woman back to a London house tied to her own past—and to a missing teenager. Jenny Jackson’s The Shampoo Effect, her second novel after Pineapple Street and a “Read with Jenna” book club pick, sends a young writer to a small Massachusetts town and into her boyfriend’s circle of childhood friends.
The month’s solitary nonfiction entry is Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, drawn from more than a thousand interviews.
Here’s the full list:
This data was collected by Syndetics Unbound. The search data is fully anonymized the day it is collected.
