You can go down a rabbit hole about the ways in which St. Paul and Minneapolis residents are different. Who really knows who works harder, drinks more craft beers or supports the arts more fervently? But one thing we can say for sure: They like the same books.

If you want to get a library copy of blockbuster novel “The Women,” for instance, get ready for a long wait. Readers at St. Paul Public Library, Hennepin County Library and, for that matter, Carver County Library all love it and pretty much everyone placed it on hold.

Kristin Hannah’s look at women who served in Vietnam was the most checked-out book, accounting for both books and e-books, in St. Paul and Carver County, and it was the most checked-out e-book at Hennepin County Library (for physical books, it placed second, edged out by Minnesota writer William Kent Krueger’s “The River We Remember”). If you signed up for “The Women” at HCLIB right now, you’d be at the end of a list of nearly 2,000 readers. Your odds are much better at Carver or St. Paul, both of which have just a few dozen holds (unless you want to download the audiobook, which has almost 5,000 holds in St. Paul).

Comparing the top 10s of the library systems reveals that readers in all three places have similar tastes, and that their tastes are not much different from the rest of the country, since all of the top 10s are bestsellers.

Five books appear on all three lists: “The Women,” “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store,” “Tom Lake,” “Lessons in Chemistry” and “The River We Remember.” Hennepin and St. Paul actually line up on eight of the top titles, also including “The Fourth Wing” (by “Onyx Storm” writer Rebecca Yarros), “The Covenant of Water” and “Demon Copperhead.”

St. Paul’s other two titles are “Remarkably Bright Creatures” and Emily Henry’s “Funny Story,” whereas Hennepin’s are “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” and John Grisham’s “The Exchange.” The five books Carver doesn’t share with the other two systems are still huge international successes: “First Lie Wins,” “The Housemaid,” “Hello Beautiful,” “The Housemaid’s Secret” and “Just for the Summer.”

Abby Jimenez, who wrote “Summer,” and Krueger are the only two Minnesota authors on the three lists and, strikingly, all 17 books that appear on at least one of the three lists are fiction.

Despite the huge popularity of romance novels, Jimenez’s and Yarros' novels are the only two from that broad genre, while the Grisham and Krueger books are the only two mysteries. “The Housemaid” books, as well as “First Lie,” are thrillers.

Most of the works would be shelved as “literary fiction,” an amorphous category that includes titles such as James McBride’s Kirkus Prize winner “Heaven and Earth,” Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize winner “Demon Copperhead” and Oprah’s Book Club selection “Hello Beautiful.”

In line with studies that show women and girls read much more than boys and men, and are more likely than men to read books by both genders, 13 of the total of 17 titles are by women, led by such perennial favorites as Hannah, Kingsolver and Ann Patchett (“Tom Lake”).

One sign of the enduring popularity of nearly all of these books is that readers were willing to wait for them. Although the lists note the books that were most checked out in 2024, the only ones actually published in 2024 were “The Women,” which came out in February of last year, and “Just for the Summer,” an April book.

That delayed effect means we’ll need to wait until next year to see if such 2024 biggies as Percival Everett’s bestselling, National Book Award-winning “James” or Sarah J. Maas' “House of Flame and Shadow” make the lists.