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. | – |  |
Freedom | 1 month |
| 2. | 2. |  |
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet | 3 months |
| 3. | 4. |  |
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest | 3 months |
| 4. | 10. |  |
The Passage | 2 months |
| 5. | 3. |  |
Tinkers | 4 months |
| 6. | 4. |  |
Faithful Place | 2 months |
| 7. | 6. |  |
The Big Short | 6 months |
| 8. (tie) | 7. |  |
Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence |
3 months |
| 8. (tie) | – |  |
Super Sad True Love Story | 1 month |
| 10. | – |  |
A Visit from the Goon Squad |
1 month |
Three of the summer’s biggest literary novels vaulted onto our list in August. Surprising probably no one, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen came out on August 31 and in one day was popular enough to debut at the top of our list. Two other literary superstars also debuted, Gary Shteyngart with Super Sad True Love Story, reviewed here, and Jennifer Egan with A Visit from the Goon Squad, reviewed and profiled here. Meanwhile, David Shields’ controversial Reality Hunger ended its run on our list and graduated to the Hall of Fame. Shields wrote a spritied defense of his book for us and provided a supplementary and exhaustive reading list as well. Elsewhere, Stieg Larsson’s second “Millennium” book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, got bumped from our list (though the trilogy’s final book remains firmly ensconced), as did weighty fave War and Peace. Near Misses: The Girl Who Played with Fire, War and Peace, The Imperfectionists, The Gone-Away World, Things We Didn’t See Coming. See Also: Last month’s list
