The Millions Top Ten: August 2012

September 4, 2012 | 15 books mentioned 1 2 min read

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 August.

This
Month
Last
Month
Title On List
1. 2. cover A Naked Singularity 3 months
2. cover Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace 1 month
3. 3. cover Bring Up the Bodies 4 months
4. 4. cover How to Sharpen Pencils 5 months
5. 6. cover The Swerve: How the World Became Modern 5 months
6. 5. cover The Patrick Melrose Novels 3 months
7. cover Gone Girl 1 month
8. 7. cover New American Haggadah 6 months
9. 10. cover A Hologram for the King 2 months
10. 9. cover Binocular Vision 3 months

A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava is our newest number one, with a ton of reader interest since De La Pava was profiled by Garth Hallberg in June. The book replaces Denis Johnson’s Pulitzer finalist Train Dreams in the top spot, as it graduates to our Hall of Fame. Our list has two debuts this month. D.T. Max’s widely anticipated biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace lands in the second spot (read the book’s opening paragraphs). And Gillian Flynn’s juggernaut of a novel Gone Girl is our other debut. Dropping off our list is Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language, which was brought to our readers’ attention when author Reif Larsen penned an engrossing exploration of the infographic.

Other Near Misses: Broken Harbor, How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life, Leaving the Atocha Station, Gone Girl, and The Flame Alphabet . See Also: Last month’s list.

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