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 October.
| This Month |
Last Month |
Title | On List | |
| 1. | – |  |
1Q84 | 1 month |
| 2. | 1. |  |
The Enemy | 6 months |
| 3. | – |  |
The Marriage Plot | 1 month |
| 4. | 4. |  |
The Bathtub Spy | 3 months |
| 5. | 3. |  |
The Art of Fielding | 2 months |
| 6. | 5. |  |
Leaves of Grass | 4 months |
| 7. | 9. |  |
The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life | 2 months |
| 8. | 6. |  |
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry | 6 months |
| 9. | 7. |  |
A Moment in the Sun | 5 months |
| 10. | – |  |
Lightning Rods | 1 month |
The literary battle royale of 2011 played out and Haruki Murakami emerged the winner with 1Q84 (read our review here) debuting atop our October list. Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot (read our review here), meanwhile, debuted a bit farther down the list, but still put up an impressive showing. These two weren’t the only novels to make a splash in October, though. As Garth wrote in his review, “in a just world, Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods would be greeted with the same frenzy of publicity that attended Freedom last year, or The Marriage Plot just this month.”
The Murakami debut bumps Christopher Hitchens’The Enemy from the top spot, while Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric, that perhaps unlikely favorite of Millions readers graduates to our Hall of Fame. Don’t miss the review that started it all.
Falling off our list is Geoff Dyer’s Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (our review). This is the second of Dyer’s books (Out of Sheer Rage) to spend time on our list but fail to make our Hall of Fame. Also slipping from our list was Christopher Boucher’s debut novel How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (our review).
Other Near Misses: The Missing of the Somme, The Sisters Brothers, and The Sense of an Ending. See Also: Last month’s list.
