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 Novel: A Biography | 4 months |
| 2. | 2. |  |
Station Eleven | 4 months |
| 3. | 3. |  |
The Bone Clocks | 5 months |
| 4. | 5. |  |
My Brilliant Friend |
2 months |
| 5. | 6. |  |
The Narrow Road to the Deep North | 4 months |
| 6. | – |  |
The David Foster Wallace Reader |
1 month |
| 7. | 7. |  |
The Strange Library | 2 months |
| 8. | 8. |  |
All the Light We Cannot See |
3 months |
| 9. | 10. |  |
Dept. of Speculation |
2 months |
| 10. | – |  |
Loitering: New and Collected Essays | 1 month |
Happy New Year and glad tidings to you and yours. It’s 2015 now; the year we’ve been promised hoverboards and self-lacing sneakers. We have half of these things (so far), and we also have two new entrants to our hallowed Hall of Fame: Reading Like a Writer and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
Overall, though, there is little change beyond the calendar. Our top-ranking book, The Novel: A Biography, remains the same for a second consecutive month, a second consecutive year. It’s followed by our own Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which concerns itself with, among other things, a contagious disease that brings about the disintegration of civilization. (Et tu, California*?)
And yet, the dawn of the new year does come with some new additions as well. Cracking our list in the tenth position is two-time Year in Reading alumnus (one, two) Charles D’Ambrosio’s widely acclaimed essay collection, Loitering. In her review for our site, staffer Hannah Gersen identified the qualities of the work that make it so impressive:
What I admired most about these essays is the way each one takes its own shape, never conforming to an expected narrative or feeling the need to answer all the questions housed within. D’Ambrosio allows his essays their ambivalence, and this gives ideas space to move freely across time, so that even “Seattle, 1974,” which was published twenty years ago, reflecting upon a time twenty years before, speaks to the present day.
Higher up on the list, in the sixth spot, we find Little, Brown’s nearly 1,000-page long omnibus, The David Foster Wallace Reader. It’s a collection composed of excerpts and full-length pieces from David Foster Wallace’s oeuvre, as selected by a dozen writers and critics, such as Hari Kunzru and Anne Fadiman. These pieces and their afterwords, wrote Jonathan Russell Clark, appeal equally to new readers and longtime devotees alike:
For those unfamiliar with Wallace, the Reader will hopefully spark enough interest in his work to help some readers get over just how damned intimidating his writing can be. … For Wallace fans, however, TDFWR is a chance to go back and read some of his most inventive and brilliant pieces, but more than that it’s an opportunity to reassess Wallace’s work, to judge it chronologically and thus progressively, and by doing so reacquaint one’s self to this incredible writer and thinker and person.
Next month, we’ll watch closely to see if David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks will come one month closer to the Hall of Fame. As I noted last September, doing so would make Mitchell the only author to have reached The Millions’s Hall of Fame for three separate works.
*Was that a measles reference, or a pun related to another Millions staffer’s recent novel? Why not both?
Near Misses: To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, My Struggle: Book 1, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, An Untamed State, and The Paying Guests. See Also: Last month’s list.
