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. |  |
1Q84 | 3 months |
| 2. | 3. |  |
The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life | 4 months |
| 3. | 2. |  |
The Marriage Plot | 3 months |
| 4. | 5. |  |
The Art of Fielding | 4 months |
| 5. | 4. |  |
The Bathtub Spy | 5 months |
| 6. | – |  |
Pulphead | 1 month |
| 7. | – |  |
The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World | 1 month |
| 8. | – |  |
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains | 1 month |
| 9. | 6. |  |
Lightning Rods | 4 months |
| 10. | – |  |
The Book of Disquiet | 1 month |
While the top of our final list for 2011 included the same familiar names and 1Q84 still enthroned at #1, our year-end coverage helped push four eclictic new titles onto the lower half of our list. John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead was one of the most talked about books of 2011 and our own Bill and Garth offered glowing comments on the book in our Year in Reading. Jonathan Safran Foer touted Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows as a book that changed his life. (Our own Emily Mandel also wrote a fascinating essay inspired by the book over a year ago.) Colum McCann said of Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, “It was like opening Joyce’s back door and finding another genius there in the garden.” Finally, Hannah Gerson came up with “12 Holiday Gifts That Writers Will Actually Use” but only one of them was a book,
The Gift by Lewis Hyde.
With all these new books showing up on our list, four titles got knocked off: Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, John Sayles’s A Moment in the Sun, and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
Other Near Misses: Train Dreams and The Great Frustration See Also: Last month’s list.
