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 August.
| This Month | Last Month | Title | On List | |
| 1. | 2. |  |
The Sympathizer | 5 months |
| 2. | 1. |  |
Mr. Splitfoot | 5 months |
| 3. | 4. |  |
Girl Through Glass | 6 months |
| 4. | 5. |  |
Zero K | 4 months |
| 5. | 6. |  |
The Lost Time Accidents | 6 months |
| 6. | 7. |  |
Barkskins | 3 months |
| 7. | 9. |  |
Ninety-Nine Stories of God | 2 months |
| 8. | 8. |  |
Innocents and Others | 2 month |
| 9. | – |  |
The Sellout | 1 month |
| 10. | 10. |  |
The Nest | 3 months |
“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner, who may have been unconsciously foreseeing Tessa Hadley’s novel, and its six-month run on our site’s Top Ten. While at times the book seemed likely to drop from our rankings – it began in tenth position and only once cracked the top three – it was nevertheless a gritty and determined run, now punctuated by its ascendance to our Hall of Fame.
Most of the other titles on our list bumped up a spot to fill The Past‘s void, and a solitary newcomer emerged this August in our ninth spot. There, Paul Beatty’s satirical novel, The Sellout, joins our list for the first time.
The Sellout has been mentioned fairly often on our site, dating back to last December when staff writer Michael Schaub called it, “One of the funniest books I read this year was also one of the best novels I’ve ever read.” (Knowing Schaub, he’s going to take full credit for the book’s appearance on our list now, nevermind the fact that it’s been a year since he wrote that line.)
But the praise didn’t end there. Several months after Schaub selected The Sellout in his Year in Reading, fellow Millions staff writer Matt Seidel wrote:
Beatty’s voice is as appealing, erudite, and entertaining as any since Alexander Portnoy’s. … It is a lacerating, learned, witty, and vulgar voice — definitely not pejorative-free — brash and vulnerable and self-righteous in its jeremiad against self-righteousness of any kind.
Still more recently, Alcy Levya traced a through-line between some of Beatty’s lodestars – Richard Pryor, Kurt Vonnegut, and Dave Chapelle – to investigate the circumstances of the book’s creation, as well as its enduring importance:
In many ways, the comedian could very easily stand in place of the narrator in The Sellout: both being intelligent and hilarious with their keen and unfiltered views of our society, and both having to come to grips with the responsibility — and the cost — of being empowered to act on that vision. All of the characters, regardless of how completely absurd they seem, are reacting to living in a time in which Beatty also resides; one in which he is daring to call something “‘Racism’ in a post-racial world.”
This month’s near misses included: Signs Preceding the End of the World, Heroes of the Frontier, The Queen of the Night, Homegoing and The Underground Railroad. See Also: Last month’s list.
