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 September.

This
Month
Last
Month

Title
On List

1.
–

The Bone Clocks
1 month

2.
1.

A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide to Saving the World
5 months

3.
9.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
3 months

4.
2.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
2 months

5.
7.

Cosmicomics

2 months

6.
4.

The Round House
3 months

7.
5.

Well-Read Women: Portraits of Fiction’s Most Beloved Heroines

6 months

8.
10.

My Struggle: Book 1

3 months

9.
8.

Reading Like a Writer
3 months

10.
6.

The Son
6 months

Welcome to the party, David Mitchell! Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say, “Welcome back to the party.” Mitchell’s no stranger to our Top Ten, you see. Back in May, I observed that Mitchell is part of an elite group of eight authors who have reached our Hall of Fame on two separate occasions. Will this be number three? Every indication so far tells me that, yes, The Bone Clocks will follow in the footsteps of its predecessors — Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet — straight to the Millions record books. (No author has made it to our Hall of Fame for three separate books.)

Why, exactly, is The Bone Clocks so individually appealing, though? Well, as Brian Ted Jones put it in his review for our site, the book serves as a pivot point in Mitchell’s canon:
The Bone Clocks marks such a change of attitude in Mitchell, a turn toward something grimmer. He’s always been drawn to elements of darkness, of course. Predacity — the animal way humans have of making prey out of each other — has been his primary theme throughout the five novels that came before this. And those novels, to be sure, are all full of monsters.

In The Bone Clocks, though, Mitchell explores a new theme:  regret.
And, aside from what’s different, the book also displays some of Mitchell’s best writing to date. As Jones explains:
There is a moment in the very last pages — you will definitely know it when you get there — where Mitchell reaches right into your chest, puts his fingers on your heart, and presses down. The kind of moment you would choose to live inside for all eternity, if you had to pick just one.
I predict we’ll be seeing Mitchell’s name atop our Top Ten for many months to come.

Meanwhile, with the addition of one work comes the graduation of another. At long last, Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins has ascended to our Hall of Fame. Walter’s novel represents the first addition to our Hall of Fame since last June.

Near Misses: The Children Act, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Americanah, 10:04, and The Secret Place. See Also: Last month’s list.

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 May.

This
Month
Last
Month

Title
On List

1.
1.

The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose
6 months

2.
2.

Beautiful Ruins
3 months

3.
5.

Bark: Stories
2 months

4.
3.

The Son
2 months

5.
4.

Just Kids

5 months

6.
8.

Eleanor & Park
2 months

7.
6.

Well-Read Women: Portraits of Fiction’s Most Beloved Heroines
2 months

8.
9.

The Good Lord Bird

2 months

9.
–

A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide to Saving the World
1 month

10.
10.

Jesus’ Son: Stories
2 months

In order to graduate to our Hall of Fame, books must remain on the Millions Top Ten for more than six months. The feat has only been accomplished by 82 books in the series’s five year history. Within that subset of hallowed tomes, though, eight authors have attained an even higher marker of success: they’ve reached the Hall of Fame more than once. This accomplishment is remarkable for two reasons: 1) the Top Ten typically favors heavily marketed new releases, so it means that these eight authors have more than once produced blockbusters in the past few years; and 2) because Top Ten graduates must remain on our monthly lists for over half a year before ascending to the Hall of Fame, that means their books must be popular enough to have sustained success. (In other words, marketing only gets you far.)

The names of these eight authors should be familiar to Millions readers, of course. They belong to some of the most successful writers of the past 25 years: David Foster Wallace* (Infinite Jest, The Pale King), Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, This Is How You Lose Her), Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest), David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet), Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies), Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, Freedom), George Saunders (Tenth of December, Fox 8), and — as of this month — Dave Eggers (Zeitoun, The Circle).

(*David Foster Wallace has the unique distinction, actually, of having two of his own books in our Hall of Fame in addition to a biography written about him.)

Even money would seem to indicate that Alice Munro is poised to join this esteemed group next. Her Selected Stories graduated to the Hall of Fame shortly after her Nobel Prize was awarded in 2013, and her collection, The Beggar Maid, has been holding fast ever since. Meanwhile, the surprise re-emergence of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, which has been hovering at the bottom of the Top Ten lists these past two months, indicates that maybe he’ll reach that group soon as well. His novella, Train Dreams, graduated in August of 2012.

Changing gears a bit: the lone new addition to our Top Ten this month in the form of Rachel Cantor’s mouthful of a novel, A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide to Saving the World. The book, which was published last month, was featured in our Great 2014 Book Preview, during which time Millions staffer Hannah Gersen posed the eternal question, “It’s got time travel, medieval kabbalists, and yes, pizza. What more can you ask for?”

What more, indeed?

Near Misses: Little Failure: A Memoir, Americanah, Stories of Anton Chekhov, My Struggle: Book 1, and Tampa. See Also: Last month’s list.