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 February.
This
Month
Last
Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
The Novel: A Biography
5 months
2.
2.
Station Eleven
5 months
3.
4.
My Brilliant Friend
3 months
4.
3.
The Bone Clocks
6 months
5.
5.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
5 months
6.
6.
The David Foster Wallace Reader
2 months
7.
7.
The Strange Library
3 months
8.
8.
All the Light We Cannot See
4 months
9.
9.
Dept. of Speculation
3 months
10.
10.
Loitering: New and Collected Essays
2 months
I’m not going to pull any punches with you, Millions readers. This is the most boring update to our Top Ten in the history of the Top Ten. Not a single new title has cracked our list, and the flipping of My Brilliant Friend and The Bone Clocks is the only movement on the list whatsoever.
That in mind, let’s take a look at this month’s crop.
In first place is the hefty Novel: A Biography, a book that has been on the list for five months. Last month, it was also the first on the list. The hardcover book is 1,200 pages long, published by Belknap Press, and measures 2.2 x 6.5 x 10.5 inches. Its ISBN-13, which serves as its identification number to industry insiders and computer systems alike, is 978-0674724730. There is also an ISBN-10 used for identifying the book on Amazon, and in our website’s shortlink system. That number is 0674724739. The list price of the book is $39.95, which at the time of this writing translates to approximately ¥4,776.62, £25.98, and R$116.18 in Japanese, English, and Brazilian currencies, respectively.
Next on the list is Station Eleven, which is exactly 6 inches wide and 8.5 inches long. You would need to lay 185,614,983.5 copies of this book end-to-end if you wanted them to circle the Earth. The book’s shipping weight of 1.2 pounds means it weighs more than three fully-grown pygmy marmosets, which each account for only 4.9 ounces apiece. There are three unique vowels in the first word used for this book’s title; the second word in this book’s title uses the same vowel three times.
My Brilliant Friend is the book in third place this month, and this is the book’s third month on our list. The book’s cover features an illustration of three little girls, and there are three words in the book’s title. It is three hundred and thirty one pages long. So far I have written three sentences in this paragraph, excepting this one.
The fourth book on the Top Ten this month is The Bone Clocks, which is published by Random House. Random House’s United States headquarters are located in New York City, but the publisher’s contact information page lists addresses in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Germany, India, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, United Kingdom, Uruguay, and Venezuela as well. The chief exports of Uruguay are meat, wool, and hides and skins. Uruguay declared independence in 1825, but that independence was not recognized by Brazil until 1828.
At 352 pages, a hardcover copy of The Narrow Road to the Deep North is exactly 1.3 inches thick. You could stack 66 copies of the book in a pile and that pile would be slightly taller than Shaquille O’Neal. Because this book is 9.6 inches tall and 6.5 inches wide, and because a stack of 66 copies would top off above seven feet in height, you could lie down on the floor staring up at the stack and it would appear, in a certain way, and with the right perspective, as if the stack of Narrow Road to the Deep North books was forming a sort of narrow road to the deep sky, if that makes any sense at all, which perhaps it doesn’t.
Sixth on this month’s list is The David Foster Wallace Reader. A Google search of David Foster Wallace’s name yields 31,400,000 results in 0.22 seconds. That same search on Bing results in 2,050,000 results. My attempt to search AltaVista did not yield any results, as apparently Googling for AltaVista now directs people to Yahoo’s search page. A similar nostalgic search did prove to me that Ask Jeeves is still alive and kicking, however.
The New York Knicks had a pitiful 4-15 record on December 2nd, the day The Strange Library was published in America. Since then, the Knicks have “improved” to 12-46 at the time of this writing. The Strange Library, meanwhile, has reached the seventh spot on our Top Ten.
All the Light We Cannot See remains in the eighth spot this month. The ninth spot belongs to Dept. of Speculation. In tenth position is Loitering: New and Collected Essays. If you bought all three of these books and put them in a tote bag with a can of Coca-Cola, the contents of that bag would weigh a total of 3.6 pounds.
Join us next month to see if we can shake things up a bit further!
Near Misses: My Struggle: Book 1, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, An Untamed State, The Paying Guests and The First Bad Man. See Also: Last month’s list.
I find it beyond interesting that “The Mystery Guest” (no. 10 on list) has maybe 7 reviews on Amazon. Yet The Millions “readers” are all over it, and have been for 4 months? I’m not entirely sure what to make of that. But I DO know this: Over at Goodreads.com, there are 87!! reviews, not to mention over 300 total ratings on the book. Maybe you guys should consider linking to a somewhat more actively literate and engaged group. (I’m still puzzled by the disconnect at Amazon)
Mike, The reason Millions readers dig A Mystery Guest probably begins here. We also reviewed it in 2007.
As for why we (with some reservations) link to Amazon, this piece explains the reasoning (particularly section 3).