The Millions Top Ten: March 2015

April 10, 2015 | 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 March.

This
Month
Last
Month
Title On List
1. 1. cover The Novel: A Biography 6 months
2. 2. cover Station Eleven 6 months
3. 3. cover My Brilliant Friend 4 months
4. 5. cover The Narrow Road to the Deep North
6 months
5. 7. cover The Strange Library
4 months
6. 6. cover The David Foster Wallace Reader
3 months
7. 9. cover Dept. of Speculation 4 months
8. 8. cover All the Light We Cannot See
5 months
9. 10. cover Loitering: New and Collected Essays
3 months
10. cover The Buried Giant 1 month

 

Well, folks, it’s happened. The enduring success of David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks has pushed the author to a Millions echelon so high that it’s never before been reached. That’s right: Mitchell is now the only author in site history to reach our hallowed Hall of Fame for three (count ’em!) different works.

And with The Bone Clocks joining his past works, Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Mitchell’s latest achievement puts him ahead of 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 TattooThe Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest), Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies), Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, Freedom), George Saunders (Tenth of December, Fox 8), and Dave Eggers (Zeitoun, The Circle), each of whom authored two Hall of Fame titles. Maybe this repeated success will be enough to coax him into a Year in Reading 2015 appearance. (ARE YOU LISTENING, PUBLICISTS?)

Joining this month’s list thanks to The Bone Clocks‘s graduation is Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, The Buried Giant. It’s a book “about war and memory,” wrote Millions staffer Lydia Kiesling in her extremely personal review of the work for this site. “But it is also about love and memory, and you don’t need to have lived through an atrocity to get it.”

Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that our own Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Elevenwhich is poised to graduate to our Hall of Fame next month, was the recent winner of The Morning News‘s annual Tournament of Books. (It beat out Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, which is also on our Top Ten.) The novel, which has earned the praise of George R. R. Martin, took the final match-up by a score of 15-2, which should be decisive enough to persuade all of you who haven’t yet bought the book to do so immediately.

Join us next month as we graduate three books and open the doors for three newcomers. Will they be among the “Near Misses” below, or will they be something new entirely?

Near Misses: My Struggle: Book 1, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, An Untamed State, The Paying Guests and The First Bad Man. See Also: Last month’s list.

works on special projects for The Millions. He lives in Baltimore and he frequents dive bars. His interests can be followed on his Tumblr, Nick Recommends and Twitter, @nemoran3.