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 July.
| This Month | Last Month | Title | On List | |
| 1. | 2. |  |
Mr. Splitfoot | 4 months |
| 2. | 1. |  |
The Sympathizer | 4 months |
| 3. | 5. |  |
The Past | 6 months |
| 4. | 3. |  |
Girl Through Glass | 5 months |
| 5. | 6. |  |
Zero K | 3 months |
| 6. | 8. |  |
The Lost Time Accidents | 5 months |
| 7. | 10. |  |
Barkskins | 2 months |
| 8. | – |  |
Innocents and Others | 1 month |
| 9. | – |  |
Ninety-Nine Stories of God | 1 month |
| 10. | 9. |  |
The Nest | 2 months |
There’s some jostling atop the list this month as Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot pulls ahead of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. Likewise, there’s been a minor shake-up in the third and fourth positions as Girl Through Glass drops below The Past, and Zero K holds pretty steady.
The real mover in July, by contrast, was Annie Proulx’s Barkskins, which climbed three spots from tenth to seventh, a rise no doubt attributable to Claire Cameron’s strong endorsement in her “Summer Reading List for Wretched Assholes Who Prefer to Wallow in Someone Else’s Misery.” Of course, highlighting this influence reminds one of Mary Shelley’s question from The Last Man: “What is there in our nature that is forever urging us on towards pain and misery?”
Meanwhile we bid adieu to What Belongs to You and My Name is Lucy Barton, both of which have punched one-way tickets to the literary Valhalla known to mere mortals as the Millions Hall of Fame. In their places we welcome two new arrivals.
Among those newcomers is Dana Spiotta’s Innocents and Others, which Jason Arthur called “a novel about how intimacy works best from a distance” in his review for our site. “There is also so much more to this book that defies quick summary,” explained Edan Lepucki in her long, thoughtful interview with Spiotta, such as “technology and how it creates, bolsters, and distorts identity; making and consuming art; the responsibility and trespassing of representation; friendship; imagination; the fear of being unoriginal.” (P.S. Edan, did your resolution from last January work out?)
Joining Spiotta on this month’s list is Joy Williams’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God, which our own Nick Ripatrazone called “gorgeously written, sentence-to-sentence … arriv[ing] in vignettes that are condensed but not constrained; tight but not dry.” He noted forty-nine other reasons to read the book as well, in case you needed them, which you really shouldn’t because Joy Williams is one of America’s best living writers of short stories and fiction – and for my money she’s unquestionably the best author of travel guides.
‘Til next month, as they say!
This month’s near misses included: Signs Preceding the End of the World, The Queen of the Night, Heroes of the Frontier, The Girls, and Homegoing. See Also: Last month’s list.
