The Millions Top Ten: August 2013

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 November.

This Month
Last Month

Title
On List

1.
1.

The Sellout
4 months

2.
2.

Ninety-Nine Stories of God
5 months

3.
3.

The Trespasser
2 months

4.
6.

The Underground Railroad
3 months

5.
–

Moonglow
1 month

6.
5.

Barkskins
6 months

7.
10.

Commonwealth
2 months

8.
8.

Here I Am
3 months

9.
7.

Pond
3 months

10.
9.

Innocents and Others
5 months

How fitting it is for Don DeLillo’s Zero K to move on to our Millions Hall of Fame in this, the month of November, the time of no baseball and, thus, no Ks. (I will not apologize for this joke; No I Said No I Won’t No.)
Speaking of baseball, others have pointed out the accuracy of Back to the Future II‘s foretelling of our current American predicament — the Cubs winning the World Series; Biff Tannen ascending to a position of unimaginable power — and so in that regard, it’s fitting that an author who got his start around the time that movie came out would grace our latest Top Ten. Michael Chabon, of course, requires no introduction, and least of all from someone who’d build a strained Back to the Future II reference upon the foundation of a corny baseball joke. Nevertheless here we are.
Moonglow, is a welcome addition to this month’s list. In her preview for our site last summer, Tess Malone wrote:

We’ve all had that relative who spills their secrets on their deathbed, yet most of us don’t think to write them down. Chabon was 26 years old, already author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, when he went to see his grandfather for the last time only to hear the dying man reveal buried family stories. Twenty-six years later and the Pulitzer Prize winner’s eighth novel is inspired by his grandfather’s revelations. A nearly 500-page epic, Moonglow explores the war, sex, and technology of mid-century America in all its glory and folly. It’s simultaneously Chabon’s most imaginative and personal work to date.

A few weeks ago, Chabon expanded on this balancing act between novel and memoir in an interview for our site:

[Some people have claimed] that memoirs are more appropriate to the time we live in, but also superior to fiction. Listening to that kind of talk and seeing situations like the James Frey incident…The thing that made everyone upset was the fact that he had lied, you know? That he passed this thing off as true when it was a work of fiction was wrong. What pissed me off as a novelist was that he wrote it as a novel and nobody wanted to publish it. Then he relabeled it as a memoir and suddenly everybody wants to publish it and everyone wants to read it.

That offends me because I’m a novelist and writing novels is what I do. I take that personally on some levels. It also offends me because it’s bullshit. Memoirs are bullshit to some degree. I don’t mean memoirists are liars; some might be, most are not. I know memoirists try to be scrupulous and try not to deviate from what they remember. It’s the last few words of my sentence where the bullshit comes in. Of course what you remember is a lie or a distortion. It’s inaccurate, there’s conflation, there’s elision. There are gaps, there maybe things that you’ve deliberately forgotten and then forgotten that you’ve forgotten so that you sincerely think they didn’t happen.
Elsewhere on the list, a few titles jostled around, but nothing dropped out altogether. Stay tuned for next month’s list, which will likely be influenced by our ongoing Year in Reading series.

This month’s near misses included: The Daily Henry James, The Nest, Heroes of the Frontier, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, and The Girls. See Also: Last month’s list.