The Millions Top Ten: June 2011

July 1, 2011 | 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 June.

This
Month
Last
Month
Title On List
1. 1. cover The Pale King 4 months
2. 4. cover The Enemy 2 months
3. 2. cover The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books 5 months
4. 3. cover The Imperfectionists 6 months
5. 6. cover Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric 3 months
6. 8. cover The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry 2 months
7. 7. cover Skippy Dies 6 months
8. 10. cover The Hunger Games 4 months
9. cover A Moment in the Sun 1 month
10. cover Otherwise Known as the Human Condition 1 month

David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King is again in the top spot, but, interestingly, Christopher Hitchens’ "Kindle Single" The Enemy climbs further after its debut last month. The sudden proliferation of long-form journalism as ebook originals – Byliner has made a splash after releasing several of its own – will be an interesting trend to watch.

Debuting this month were filmmaker John Sayles’s massive and very well-recieved novel A Moment in the Sun and Geoff Dyer’s collection of essays Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. This is Dyer’s second book to crack our Top Ten, joining Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence.

Graduating to our Hall of Fame, meanwhile, are Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand and Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky.

Near Misses:The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, The Tiger’s Wife, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and Unfamiliar Fishes. See Also: Last month’s list

created The Millions and is its publisher. He and his family live in New Jersey.