The Millions Top Ten: February 2011

March 1, 2011 | 14 books mentioned 1 2 min read

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. 3. cover The Imperfectionists 2 months
2. 4. cover Atlas of Remote Islands 3 months
3. 8. cover Skippy Dies 2 months
4. 5. cover Room 6 months
5. 7. cover Cardinal Numbers 3 months
6. 10. cover The Finkler Question 4 months
7. 9. cover Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption 3 months
8. cover The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books 1 month
9. cover Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 1 month
10. cover The Hunger Games 1 month

Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists surges to the top of our list, followed by Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands, and Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies. Meanwhile, the bottom of our list includes three very diverse debuts. The Late American Novel, co-edited by yours truly, is only just now "officially" out but it has been shipping from Amazon for a few weeks now. (To everyone out there who’s picked up the book, thanks for all your support.) Also, new on the list is the Mark Twain Autobiography that has gotten so much attention over the last few months. A few commentators, notably Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker, deflated the hype somewhat, but there is undoubtedly an enormous amount of interest in this literary legend. Finally, all the excitement around YA sensation The Hunger Games has landed the first book in the popular series on our list. Those three debuts took the spots left open by a trio of new Hall of Fame inductees, three books you could argue were the biggest literary reads of last summer, Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and, of course, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

Near Misses: How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, Postcards from Penguin: One Hundred Book Covers in One Box, To the End of the Land, Just Kids , and Woman in White.

See Also: Last month’s list

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