The Millions Top Ten: February 2018

March 14, 2018 | 2 min read

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.

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This Month Last Month Title On List
1. 1. cover 5 Year Diary 3 months
2. 2. cover Manhattan Beach 5 months
3. 3. cover Her Body and Other Parties 3 months
4. 4. cover Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process
4 months
5. 5. cover Fire Sermon 2 months
6. 8. cover Little Fires Everywhere
5 months
7. 7. cover Sing, Unburied, Sing 3 months
8. 10. cover The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
2 months
9. 9. cover My Favorite Thing is Monsters
2 months
10. cover 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 OdysseyDon’t Save AnythingBelladonnaMy Absolute Darling, and Frankenstein in BaghdadSee Also: Last month’s list.

works on special projects for The Millions. He lives in Baltimore and he frequents dive bars. His interests can be followed on his Tumblr, Nick Recommends and Twitter, @nemoran3.