The Millions Top Ten: September 2011

October 2, 2011 | 15 books mentioned 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 September.

This
Month
Last
Month
Title On List
1. 2. cover The Enemy 5 months
2. 3. cover Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric 6 months
3. cover The Art of Fielding 1 month
4. 10. cover The Bathtub Spy 2 months
5. 5. cover Leaves of Grass 3 months
6. 4. cover The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry 5 months
8. 7. cover A Moment in the Sun 4 months
8. 9. cover How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive 2 months
9. cover The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life 1 month
10. 9. cover Otherwise Known as the Human Condition 4 months

David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King graduates, along with The Hunger Games, to our Hall of Fame this month. Taking the vacated top spot is Christopher Hitchens’ timely The Enemy. With Ann Patchett’s The Getaway Car debuting on the list and joining another Kindle Single, The Bathtub Spy, it’s becoming pretty clear that these bite-sized e-book originals are gaining some serious traction, a trend that the media has been taking note of, of late.

Our other debut, meanwhile, is a plain old novel, certainly one of the big fiction releases of the fall, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. We first noted the book’s headline-grabbing deal in early 2010, and we highlighted it in our big second-half preview.

The big story next month will be seeing which heavyweight, literary new release will debut higher on our Top Ten, Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot (read the opening lines here) or Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 (read the opening lines here).

Near Misses: The Missing of the Somme, The Magician King, Swamplandia!, A Dance with Dragons, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, and The Tiger’s Wife. See Also: Last month’s list.

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