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 May.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
Fortune Smiles
6 months
2.
2.
The Sympathizer
2 months
3.
10.
Mr. Splitfoot
2 months
4.
7.
Girl Through Glass
3 months
5.
5.
The Past
4 months
6.
3.
What Belongs to You
5 months
7.
4.
My Name is Lucy Barton
5 months
8.
–
Zero K
1 month
9.
8.
The Lost Time Accidents
3 months
10.
9.
A Brief History of Seven Killings
6 months
People love The Millions for a variety of reasons, but most of all I love The Millions because the site’s readers do things like buy tons of copies of The Big Green Tent, Ludmila Ulitskaya’s doorstop of a book about Soviet dissidents, which features almost as many characters as it does pages. Well, maybe y’all don’t buy literal tons of copies, but certainly a substantial amount of copies – enough over a six-month span that the book has now graduated to our hallowed Hall of Fame. And that’s an impressively bookish feat, so have a round of applause!
Filling that open spot is Don DeLillo, whose Zero K describes not the Atlanta Braves pitching staff, as one might reasonably expect, but instead focuses on what Mark O’Connell called “the desire to achieve physical immortality through technology.” (Read more in O’Connell’s interview with DeLillo, which gets into the author’s iPad usage, and how long it took him to write his latest novel.) It’s a concern that, in a certain sense, can be tracked through much of DeLillo’s past work, as our own Nick Ripatrazone recently made clear in his nice piece on the author’s oeuvre: “Zero K is an extension of DeLillo’s developing themes, but it places a darker color upon them.”
Elsewhere on our list, some shakers and movers but overall things held steady.
Clinging to the last spot this month is Marlon James, whose Brief History of Seven Killings remains one of the most memorable things I read in 2015, and who really, truly belongs in our Hall of Fame. What I mean to say is: y’all should buy a few more copies of his book to ensure its graduation in next month’s write-up – not only because we’ve come this close and it’s the right thing to do, but also because it’s a fantastic book and one that you’ll return to months and years after finishing. For instance, consider this passage on the cultural variety of male loathsomeness, which I think about whenever I start feeling mean at the corner bar:
All of them came through Mantana’s. White men, that is. If the man is French he thinks that he gets away with saying cunt but saying you cohnnnt, because we bush bitches will never catch his drift. As soon as he sees you he will throw the keys at your feet saying you, park my car maintenant! Dépêche-toi! I take the keys and say yes massa, then go around to the women’s bathroom and flush it down the shittiest toilet. If he’s British, and under thirty, then his teeth are still hanging on and he’ll be charming enough to get you upstairs but too drunk to do anything. He won’t care and you won’t either, unless he vomits on you and leaves a few pounds on the dresser because that was such dreadful, dreadful business. If he’s British and over thirty, you spend the whole time watching the stereotypes pile up, from the letttttt meeeee ssssspeeeeeakkk toooo youuuuu slowwwwlyyyyy, dahhhhhhhhling beccauuuuuse youuuuuuu’re jussssst a liiiiiiiitle blaaaaack, speed of their speech to the horrible teeth, coming from that cup of cocoa right before bed. If he’s German he will be thin and he will know how to fuck, well in a car piston kind of way, but he will stop early because nobody can make German sound sexy. If he’s Italian, he’ll know how to fuck too, but he probably didn’t bathe before, thinks there’s such a thing as an affectionate face slap and will leave money even though you told him that you’re not a prostitute. If he’s Australian, he’ll just lie back and let you do all the work because even us blokes in Sydney heard about you Jamaican girls. If he’s Irish, he’ll make you laugh and he’ll make the dirtiest things sound sexy. But the longer you stay the longer he drinks, and the longer he drinks, well for each of those seven days you get seven different kinds of monster.
And this isn’t even in the top ten of passages from that book, either. So, for real, if you’re thinking about reading it, hop to it already. Take it from a monster.
This month’s near misses included: Innocents and Others, The Nest, Signs Preceding the End of the World, When We Came to the City, and The Queen of the Night. 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).