Readers looking for escapism
While big city women might be queuing up to read Fifty Shades of Grey, it's romance novelist Nora Roberts who is keeping Masterton women up at night.
Nora Roberts' The Search and O'Hurley Born are two of the most popular books at Masterton District Library at the moment, along with Jude Deveraux's Scarlet Nights: an Edilean novel.
Masterton Library manager Sandy Green describes Nora Roberts as "crazily popular", but that demand for bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey has not been noticeable.
Australian historical family drama The Plantation by Di Morrissey is the most popular title in adult fiction right now.
Mrs Green said that in these times, people are looking for feel-good books that take them away from reality.
"They know they're not going to be reading about angst and difficult lives and huge issues when they've probably got enough in their own lives."
Although adult non-fiction books may buck the trend: Left for Dead: How I Survived 71 Days in the Outback is the most popular issue of the past 10 years, followed by Nobody's Child, a biography about abuse at the hands of an adoptive father.
Mrs Green said Masterton readers are definitely people of habit, and the librarians do a lot of work to encourage reading of new authors.
"A lot of it is feeling comfortable, feeling that when they take a book by that author they know what they're going to get."
But they are not struggling for customers at the moment - the library's issues have grown by 8 per cent in the past year, and fiction title issues have grown by nearly 23 per cent.
Mrs Green said contributing factors are Masterton's ageing population, better online services, and the media phenomena around books like The Kite Runner, the Twilight series and Fifty Shades of Grey.
The Geronimo Stilton, described as fact-based fiction, is the most popular for kids - the library has 72 of the series titles and multiple copies of each to keep up with the demand.
Masterton's young people are a little more predictable, with Twilight author Stephenie Meyer coming out tops with her novel The Host.
Other top titles in the young adult section are Jacqueline Wilson's Kiss, and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Book Thief, both based in World War II Germany.
