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 February.
Looking for additional book recommendations? One of the benefits of subscribing to The Millions is access to our exclusive monthly newsletter in which our venerable staffers let you know what they’re reading right now. Learn more here.
This Month | Last Month | Title | On List | |
1. | 1. | 5 Year Diary | 3 months | |
2. | 2. | Manhattan Beach | 5 months | |
3. | 3. | Her Body and Other Parties | 3 months | |
4. | 4. | Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process |
4 months | |
5. | 5. | Fire Sermon | 2 months | |
6. | 8. | Little Fires Everywhere |
5 months | |
7. | 7. | Sing, Unburied, Sing | 3 months | |
8. | 10. | The Largesse of the Sea Maiden |
2 months | |
9. | 9. | My Favorite Thing is Monsters |
2 months | |
10. | – | The Immortalists |
1 month |
This month, the top half of our list is the same as it was last month. In fact, most of the list is the same as it was last month. What is it about February? Three years ago, we had the same thing happen, and I wound up calculating Shaquille O’Neal’s height in stacked books. It was as if I had been possessed by Harper’s “Findings” section.
But one person’s boredom is really another person’s consistency, and there is comfort in steadiness. On our list this month, the top half remains unchanged, but slight jostling occurred in the bottom. Two books graduated to our Hall of Fame: Victor LaValle’s The Changeling and Laurent Binet’s The Seventh Function of Language.
Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters fills one of the open spaces this month. Ferris’s fictional graphic diary had previously debuted on our December 2017 list, but dropped out last month, and is back again today. At that pace, look for it to reach our Hall of Fame around Thanksgiving. In her Year in Reading entry two months ago, Emily St. John Mandel said Ferris’s book “pierced [her] haze of unhappiness” and imparted “the sense of having encountered something truly extraordinary.” She raved, “Sometimes you read a book and you think, Oh. This is what a book can be.”
The other opening on this month’s list was claimed by Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists. In our Great 2018 Book Preview, Janet Potter previewed Benjamin’s second novel by saying it sounded so good that she’d have to “break [her] no-novels-about-New-Yorkers rule for this one.”
This month’s other near misses included: The Odyssey, Don’t Save Anything, Belladonna, My Absolute Darling, and Frankenstein in Baghdad. See Also: Last month’s list.