The Millions Top Ten: August 2013

The Millions Top 10
September 6, 2013 | 15 books mentioned 5

Related Books:

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 August.

This
Month		 Last
Month		 Title On List
1. 1. cover Taipei 3 months
2. 9. cover The Pioneer Detectives 2 months
3. 5. cover Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk 6 months
4. 2. cover Stand on Zanzibar 6 months
5. 4. cover The Orphan Master’s Son 4 months
6. 3. cover The Middlesteins 6 months
7. 10. cover Fox 8 2 months
8. 8. cover Visitation Street 2 months
9. 6. cover The Interestings 2 months
10. – cover Night Film 1 month

Tao Lin’s Taipei remains in our top spot. (For more on the book’s success in our Top Ten, take a look at my commentary on June’s list.) Meanwhile, our Millions Original The Pioneer Detectives by Konstantin Kakaes surges into the second spot and continues to win rave reviews from readers. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain was also a mover, landing in the third spot as it nears graduation to our illustrious Hall of Fame.

Our one debut this month is Marisha Pessl’s anticipated sophomore effort Night Film. Our own Bill Morris called the book a “stirring second act” but commenters have voiced strong disagreement.

Pessl bumps Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell from the Top Ten (at least for now).

Other Near Misses: They Don’t Dance Much, Speedboat, Wonder Boys and My Struggle: Book 1. See Also: Last month’s list.

created The Millions and is its publisher. He and his family live in New Jersey.

5 comments:

  1. You use Amazon to gauge what we’re reading…? Wow, that’s pretty indefensible. But hey, one day they’ll probably own your site as well.

    – an INDEPENDENT bookseller

  2. I DO get it: Taipei is shit by a fool who cannot write. It’s hilarious to see folks drinking the Kool-Aid en masse, and trying to put clothes on the naked emperor. Tao Lin is great o at one thing–conning people/.

  3. The Tao Lin hate seems so ridiculous and over the top… I really enjoyed the book, and I know a lot of other people who enjoyed it as well. Maybe the reason why Taipei is selling so well is more complicated than “everyone is stupid.”

  5. Lots of books sell well that doesn’t mean they are worth reading. Marisha Pessl’s piece of garbage made the bestseller list too.

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The Millions Top 10

The Millions Top Ten: January 2014

The Millions Top 10
February 20, 2014 | 15 books mentioned 2 min read

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.
1.

The Goldfinch
4 months

2.
2.

Selected Stories
4 months

3.
3.

The Flamethrowers
4 months

4.
4.

The Luminaries
4 months

5.
6.

The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose
4 months

6.
7.

Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment
2 months

7.
8.

Bleeding Edge
5 months

8.
9.

The Lowland
4 months

9.
10.

The Interestings
5 months

10.
–

Just Kids
1 month

 

Two books graduated to our Hall of Fame in January. We’re very proud to bestow the honor on our ebook original The Pioneer Detectives by Konstantin Kakaes. The book, which debuted in July 2013, is an ambitious work of page-turning reportage, the kind of journalism we all crave but that can often be hard to find. Filled with brilliant insights into how scientific discoveries are made and expertly edited by our own Garth Hallberg, The Pioneer Detectives is a bargain at $2.99. We hope you’ll pick it up if you haven’t already. Pioneer is joined in the Hall of Fame by another ebook orginal, George Saunders’s $0.99 short story Fox 8, which returned to our Top 10 for a seventh month in January after missing the list in December and therefore qualifies for the Hall.

Other than that, the list is positively gridlocked with several books staying put, including Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch atop the list. Our lone debut is unexepected: Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids. The National Book award-winning title has been popular among our readers for quite a while and was a “Near Miss” for several months on our list as recently as March 2011. The book likely got a boost thanks to Garth’s mention in his Year in Reading in December.

Incidentally, this also means that with the exception of Thomas Pynchon and the group-authored Draw it With Your Eyes Closed, our list is made up entirely of books by women.

Near Misses: The Circle, Eleanor & Park, The Son, Night Film, and Well-Read Women: Portraits of Fiction’s Most Beloved Heroines. See Also: Last month’s list.

The Millions Top 10
| 15 books mentioned 2 min read
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The Millions Top 10

The Millions Top Ten: January 2017

The Millions Top 10
February 10, 2017 | 15 books mentioned 2 min read


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.
1.

Norwegian by Night
2 months

2.
2.

The Sellout
6 months

3.
4.

The Underground Railroad
5 months

4.
3.

The Trespasser
4 months

5.
5.

Moonglow
3 months

6.
9.

The North Water
2 months

7.
–

Homesick for Another World
1 month

8.
7.

Commonwealth
4 months

9.
–

Homegoing
1 month

10.
8.

Here I Am
5 months

New year, same frontrunner: Norwegian by Night, no doubt propelled atop our list on the strength of Richard Russo’s recommendation, begins the year in first position. On its heels, The Sellout, The Underground Railroad, The Trespasser, and Moonglow jostle around. Swing Time drops out of our rankings, which was perhaps a result of Kaila Philo’s underwhelmed review for our site:

Ultimately, while Swing Time makes admirable artistic choices  — who doesn’t love a nonlinear narrative? — the main issue I take with this novel has to do with how these choices don’t mesh well to create the relevant masterpiece it could have been. The whole does not amount to the sum of its parts, in other words.

Ascending to our Hall of Fame, meanwhile, is Ninety-Nine Stories of God, the latest collection from Joy Williams, praised by our own Nick Ripatrazone (who provides a scant fifty reasons) here.
All of this action freed up spots for two newcomers on this month’s list, both of which were featured on our book previews: Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World (2017 Book Preview) and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016 Book Preview).
In Moshfegh’s case, the timing is logical. The book was previewed, it came out this past month, and y’all promptly bought it. But what explains Gyasi’s debut on our list almost a full year after we first previewed it, and half a year since it first published? Well, it recently won the John Leonard Prize for best debut novel. So there you go.
This month’s near misses included: The Nix, Pond, Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, and The Lyrics: 1961-2012. See Also: Last month’s list.

The Millions Top 10
| 15 books mentioned 2 min read
The Millions Top 10

The Millions Top Ten: September 2011

The Millions Top 10
October 2, 2011 | 15 books mentioned 2 min read

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.
2.

The Enemy
5 months

2.
3.

Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric
6 months

3.
–

The Art of Fielding
1 month

4.
10.

The Bathtub Spy
2 months

5.
5.

Leaves of Grass
3 months

6.
4.

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
5 months

8.
7.

A Moment in the Sun
4 months

8.
9.

How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive
2 months

9.
–

The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life
1 month

10.
9.

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition
4 months

David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King graduates, along with The Hunger Games, to our Hall of Fame this month. Taking the vacated top spot is Christopher Hitchens’ timely The Enemy. With Ann Patchett’s The Getaway Car debuting on the list and joining another Kindle Single, The Bathtub Spy, it’s becoming pretty clear that these bite-sized e-book originals are gaining some serious traction, a trend that the media has been taking note of, of late.
Our other debut, meanwhile, is a plain old novel, certainly one of the big fiction releases of the fall, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. We first noted the book’s headline-grabbing deal in early 2010, and we highlighted it in our big second-half preview.
The big story next month will be seeing which heavyweight, literary new release will debut higher on our Top Ten, Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot (read the opening lines here) or Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 (read the opening lines here).
Near Misses: The Missing of the Somme, The Magician King, Swamplandia!, A Dance with Dragons, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, and The Tiger’s Wife. See Also: Last month’s list.

The Millions Top 10
| 15 books mentioned 2 min read
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