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.
