The Millions Top Ten: December 2009

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for December.

This Month	Last Month		Title	On List
1.	3.		Cloud Atlas	4 months
2.	–		The Interrogative Mood	1 month
3.	7.		Austerlitz	3 months
4.	5. (tie)		The Corrections	2 months
5.	–		Let the Great World Spin	1 month
6.	4.		The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo	6 months
7.	1.		Zeitoun	6 months
8.	–		The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories	1 month
9. (tie)	7. (tie)		Asterios Polyp	4 months
9. (tie)	–		The Mystery Guest	1 month

December saw a flurry of activity as four books made their first appearances on the list. Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood, endorsed by both Jonathan Lethem and Rick Moody, caught readers’ interest. Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin has been building momentum since its National Book Award win. I also reviewed it here and last month, Reif Larsen wrote glowingly of the book. Our recent interview with superstar translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky clearly got readers interested in their latest effort, a Tolstoy collection. And David Shields’ Year in Reading contribution, while eclectic, nonetheless drew readers’ focus to Gregoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest.

Powered by continued interest in The Millions’ Best of the Millennium series, where the book had a strong showing on both out panel list and our readers’ list, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas took over the top spot in the Top Ten.

And finally, dropping from the list were Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolaño, The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, and The Wild Things by Dave Eggers.

See Also: Last month’s list