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 December.
| This Month |
Last Month |
Title | On List | |
| 1. | 1. |  |
Freedom | 5 months |
| 2. | 3. |  |
A Visit from the Goon Squad | 5 months |
| 3. | 6. (tie) |  |
Room | 4 months |
| 4. | – |  |
Atlas of Remote Islands |
1 month |
| 5. | 6. (tie) |  |
Faithful Place | 6 months |
| 6. | 4. |  |
Super Sad True Love Story | 5 months |
| 7. | 8. |  |
The Passage | 6 months |
| 8. | – |  |
Cardinal Numbers | 1 month |
| 9. | 9. |  |
The Finkler Question | 2 months |
| 10. | – |  |
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption | 1 month |
During the month of December, The Millions was flooded with book recommendations thanks to our Year in Reading series. Many of these recommendations piqued the interest of our readers, and a pair of hidden gems were intriguing enough to make it into our Top Ten. One was Anthony Doerr’s effusive praise for Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands, and the other was Sam Lipsyte’s unearthing of the late and little known Hob Broun and his Gordon Lish-edited book Cardinal Numbers. A third debut in December was Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, her hotly anticipated follow up to Seabiscuit that was noted with an “AAAH!” in December by Sam Anderson.
December also graduated a pair of books to our Hall of Fame, the second such honor for each of the authors. Joining Cloud Atlas as an all-time Millions favorite is David Mitchell’s newest, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Meanwhile, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is a second inductee from the late Stieg Larsson’s global sensation, the Millennium Trilogy
Finally, it’s worth noting that after many months of skewing male, our list has acheived gender parity, with four of the top five books penned by female writers. Don’t be surprised if Jennifer Egan’s breakout hit A Visit from the Goon Squad eclipses Jonathan Franzen‘s Freedom next month for our top spot. Near Misses: Skippy Dies, The Imperfectionists, The Hunger Games, The Autobiography of Mark Twain , and Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence. See Also: Last month’s list
