The Millions Top Ten: March 2010

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 January.

This
Month
Last
Month

Title
On List

1.
1.

The Goldfinch
4 months

2.
2.

Selected Stories
4 months

3.
3.

The Flamethrowers
4 months

4.
4.

The Luminaries
4 months

5.
6.

The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose
4 months

6.
7.

Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment
2 months

7.
8.

Bleeding Edge
5 months

8.
9.

The Lowland
4 months

9.
10.

The Interestings
5 months

10.
–

Just Kids
1 month

Two books graduated to our Hall of Fame in January. We’re very proud to bestow the honor on our ebook original The Pioneer Detectives by Konstantin Kakaes. The book, which debuted in July 2013, is an ambitious work of page-turning reportage, the kind of journalism we all crave but that can often be hard to find. Filled with brilliant insights into how scientific discoveries are made and expertly edited by our own Garth Hallberg, The Pioneer Detectives is a bargain at $2.99. We hope you’ll pick it up if you haven’t already. Pioneer is joined in the Hall of Fame by another ebook orginal, George Saunders’s $0.99 short story Fox 8, which returned to our Top 10 for a seventh month in January after missing the list in December and therefore qualifies for the Hall.

Other than that, the list is positively gridlocked with several books staying put, including Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch atop the list. Our lone debut is unexepected: Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids. The National Book award-winning title has been popular among our readers for quite a while and was a “Near Miss” for several months on our list as recently as March 2011. The book likely got a boost thanks to Garth’s mention in his Year in Reading in December.

Incidentally, this also means that with the exception of Thomas Pynchon and the group-authored Draw it With Your Eyes Closed, our list is made up entirely of books by women.

Near Misses: The Circle, Eleanor & Park, The Son, Night Film, and Well-Read Women: Portraits of Fiction’s Most Beloved Heroines. See Also: Last month’s list.

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 June, the list is also in our sidebar.ThisMonthLastMonth TitleOn List1.1.Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences5 months2.2.26666 months3.4.Olive Kitteridge5 months4.6.Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste4 months5.7.Infinite Jest4 months6.3.The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker4 months7.10.The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao4 months8.5.The Dud Avocado6 months9.8.Knockemstiff4 months10. (tie)9.Felonious Jazz2 months10. (tie)–The Savage Detectives2 monthsAs summer set in, the titles on our list stayed mostly static. Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives returns to the list. Meanwhile, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is seeing some interest, probably from folks wanting to participate in Infinite Summer, a TMN sponsored group read of the book. Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao may be getting a boost from its inclusion in the higher reaches of our Prizewinners list last month. Finally, Olive Kitteridge continues to be a favorite among Millions readers, and Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog is still at the top thanks to the enduring interest in Garth’s essay on the grammatical proclivities of our current president. Look for some changes to the list in the coming months as an impressive slate of new titles hits bookstores.Have you been reading any of the books on our Top Ten list? Let us know what you think of them.See also: Last month’s list.

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 March.

This Month
Last Month

Title
On List

1.
2.

Fortune Smiles
4 months

2.
3.

Slade House
6 months

3.
4.

The Big Green Tent
5 months

4.
5.

What Belongs to You
3 months

5.
6.

My Name is Lucy Barton
3 months

6.
10.

The Past
2 months

7.
9.

A Brief History of Seven Killings
4 months

8.
–

Girl Through Glass
1 month

9.
8.

City on Fire
6 months

10.
–

The Lost Time Accidents
1 month

Ascend, ascend Lauren Groff and Margaret Atwood! Set forth and lay claim to your spots within our Millions Hall of Fame. For one of these authors, it’s their second time making the list. For the other, it’s their debut. Can you guess which is which? The answer may surprise you.
And with the ascension of Fates and Futures and The Heart Goes Last, we welcome two newcomers to our monthly Top Ten: Girl Through Glass by Sari Wilson and The Lost Time Accidents by John Wray.
In his write-up for our Most Anticipated Book Preview three months ago, Matt Seidel described how Wilson’s novel “alternates between late-1970s New York, where its heroine works her way into George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, and the present day, where she is a dance professor having an affair with a student.” It’s a novel ripe with dramatic tension, and one more than a little fixated on body type, as Martha Anne Toll noted in her recent exploration of women — lost, thin, and small — in fiction.
Joining Wilson on the list this month is John Wray, whose newest novel, The Lost Time Accidents, covers a great many topics, such as physics, the Czech Republic, watch factories, Nazi war criminals, the Church of Scientology (but not really), and science fiction, among others. In her write-up for the Book Preview, Anne K. Yoder called it a “mash-up of sci-fi, time-travel, and family epic [that’s] both madcap and ambitious.” The novel was also covered by Michael Schaub in a recent edition of The Book Report — come for the overview, but stay for Bong Crosby!
Stay tuned for next month’s list, in which two more newcomers are poised to join our ranks.
This month’s near misses included: The Queen of the Night, Mr. Splitfoot, The Turner House, Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, and The Sellout. See Also: Last month’s list.