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 April.
| This Month |
Last Month |
Title | On List | |
| 1. | 2. |  |
Pulphead | 5 months |
| 2. | 4. |  |
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains | 5 months |
| 3. | 5. |  |
The Book of Disquiet | 5 months |
| 4. | 6. |  |
The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World | 5 months |
| 5. | 9. |  |
New American Haggadah | 2 months |
| 6. | 10. |  |
Train Dreams | 3 months |
| 7. | – |  |
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern | 1 month |
| 8. | – |  |
Binocular Vision | 1 month |
| 9. | – |  |
Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language | 1 month |
| 10. | – |  |
How to Sharpen Pencils | 1 month |
Last fall, the book world was abuzz with three new novels, the long-awaited books 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami and The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, as well as Chad Harbach’s highly touted debut The Art of Fielding. Meanwhile, Millions favorite Helen DeWitt was emerging from a long, frustrating hiatus with Lightning Rods. Now all four are graduating to our Hall of Fame after long runs on our list.
This means we have a new number one: John Jermiah Sullivan’s collection of essays Pulphead, which was discussed in glowing terms by our staffer Bill Morris in January. The graduates also open up room for four new books on our list.
A Pulitzer win has propelled Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern into our Top Ten (fiction finalist Train Dreams by Denis Johnson has already been on our list for a few months). Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision is another recent award winner making our list for the first time. Don’t miss our interview with her from last month.
In January, author Reif Larsen penned an engrossing exploration of the infographic for us. The essay has remained popular, and a book he focused on, Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language, has now landed on our Top Ten. And then in the final spot is David Rees’ pencil sharpening manual How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening. Our funny, probing interview with Rees from last month is a must read.
Near Misses: Leaving the Atocha Station, The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk, 11/22/63, The Sense of an Ending, and The Great Frustration. See Also: Last month’s list.
