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 January.
| This Month |
Last Month |
Title | On List | |
| 1. | – |  |
Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever | 1 month |
| 2. | 1. |  |
This Is How You Lose Her | 5 months |
| 3. | – |  |
Tenth of December | 1 month |
| 4. | 5. |  |
An Arrangement of Light | 2 months |
| 5. | – |  |
Building Stories | 1 month |
| 6. | 4. |  |
Gone Girl | 6 months |
| 7. | 2. |  |
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace | 6 months |
| 8. | 3. |  |
Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story | 4 months |
| 9. | 6. |  |
NW | 5 months |
| 10. | 7. |  |
Telegraph Avenue | 5 months |
To kick off a new year of our Top Ten lists at The Millions, we made a slight adjustment to our calculations. The change has to do with how we account for lower-priced, shorter-form ebook originals that have become popular with our readers and effectively gives a modest penalty to the cheaper ebooks and recognizes that a purchase of a $1.99 ebook is different from buying a hardcover costing $20 or more.
Despite this change, thanks to the overwhelmingly positive response from our readers, our first ebook original, Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever by staff writer Mark O’Connell, lands atop our list. So far, the feedback from readers has been great, and we hope more will be inspired to pick it up. An exerpt is available here and you can learn more about the book here.
Also debuting is Tenth of December by George Saunders, one of our Most Anticipated books and a title that has gotten a ton of positive press. Finally, also debuting is Chris Ware’s Building Stories, reviewed in these pages by none other than Mark O’Connell. Ware also participated in our Year in Reading in December.
Dropping from the list were David Foster Wallace’s Both Flesh and Not, Lauren Groff’s Arcadia and Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
Other Near Misses: Dear Life and The Round House. See Also: Last month’s list.
