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 December.
| This Month | Last Month | Title | On List | |
| 1. | 1. |  |
Between the World and Me | 6 months |
| 2. | 2. |  |
A Little Life | 6 months |
| 3. | 6. |  |
Fates and Furies | 4 months |
| 4. | 3. |  |
Purity | 5 months |
| 5. | 4. |  |
Slade House | 3 months |
| 6. | 5. |  |
Go Set a Watchman | 6 months |
| 7. | – |  |
Fortune Smiles | 1 month |
| 8. | 10. |  |
The Big Green Tent | 2 months |
| 9. | 9. |  |
The Heart Goes Last | 4 months |
| 10. | 8. |  |
City on Fire | 3 months |
After being crowned the 2015 National Book Award winner, Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson has received an even greater honor: entry onto The Millions‘s December 2015 Top Ten list! The collection was described in our second-half Book Preview* as being “six stories, about everything from a former Stasi prison guard in East Germany to a computer programmer ‘finding solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States,’” and it was said to “echo” the author’s “early work while also building upon the ambition of his prize-winning tome.”
Elsewhere on the list, small shakeups abound. Fates and Furies and The Big Green Tent rose three and two spots, respectively, while Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire moved from the eighth spot to the tenth. Beyond that? There isn’t too much to report.
Next month, however, three fixtures on our list— Between the World and Me, A Little Life, and Go Set a Watchman — will likely head to our Hall of Fame, and their ascendance should free up space for fresh blood. They’ll join Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen, which joins the Hall this month. If past is prologue, most of those newcomers will have been culled from our Year in Reading series. If so, do you have any guesses on which ones will become fan favorites? Will it be another installment of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet? (The first one’s already in our Hall…) Will it be Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts? And whatever it may be, will it have a Florida connection?**
Stay tuned to find out.
* Speaking of Previews, have you checked out the first installment of our Great 2016 Book Preview, which posted this week?
** Probably. Everything does.
This month’s near misses included: A Brief History of Seven Killings, The Turner House, Undermajordomo Minor, The 3 A.M. Epiphany, and A Strangeness in My Mind. See Also: Last month’s list.
