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.
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| This Month | Last Month | Title | On List | |
| 1. | 1. |  |
5 Year Diary | 2 months |
| 2. | 2. |  |
Manhattan Beach | 4 months |
| 3. | 3. |  |
Her Body and Other Parties | 2 months |
| 4. | 8. |  |
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process |
3 months |
| 5. | – |  |
Fire Sermon | 1 month |
| 6. | 6. |  |
The Seventh Function of Language: A Novel |
6 months |
| 7. | 4. |  |
Sing, Unburied, Sing | 2 months |
| 8. | 5. |  |
Little Fires Everywhere |
4 months |
| 9. | 9. |  |
The Changeling |
6 months |
| 10. | – |  |
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden |
1 month |
Exit West exits our list this month, following a parabolic stint on our Top Ten: it debuted in 7th position on in July, and later rose to the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd spots in subsequent months before winding up once more in 7th position to close. As Mohsin Hamid’s novel buoyed up our list and down again, it earned praise from no fewer than five of our Year in Reading participants: Jamel Brinkley, Michael David Lukas, Heather Scott Partington, Shanthi Sekaran, and Jeff VanderMeer. (That last author also gave a shout out to Belladonna, which is among this month’s “near misses.”) It also received critical examination from Eli Jelly-Schapiro, who remarked for our site about its author’s attempts at “tracing the fissures in human community and global space, and reflecting on the possibility of their transcendence.” Jelly-Schapiro continued:
Orbiting earth, Hamid’s novel maps the divides that structure the current global order. But it also charts one necessary future, the advent of what Aimé Césaire called a “humanism made to the measure of the world.”
Now, Hamid’s novel is off to our Hall of Fame.
Elsewhere on our list, it seems little has changed. Our 1st, 2nd, and 3rd spots belong to the books which held those spots in December. So, too, do our 6th and 9th spots. Still, some surprises can be found if one looks carefully. Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing somehow dropped three spots a scant two months after it won the National Book Award, which seems odd. Denis Johnson’s new collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, finished not long before the author passed away, appeared at the bottom of our list. Meanwhile, Jamie Quatro’s Fire Sermon pops up in 5th position, following callouts in not only our Great 2018 Book Preview, but also in four Year in Reading pieces. Our own Hannah Gersen invoked a heavyweight in her praise:
I feel bad for the new fiction I read this year, because I was always comparing it to Proust, and nothing could really stand up to that epic reading experience. However, there was one novel that swept me up with its passion, intelligence, and spiritual reach: Jamie Quatro’s Fire Sermon, which will be published in January 2018. I look forward to reading it again next year.
This month’s other near misses included: The Odyssey, Don’t Save Anything, My Absolute Darling, and Belladonna. See Also: Last month’s list.
