The Millions Top Ten: August 2019

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 Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual	4 months
2.	–		Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead	1 month
3.	3.		Normal People	4 months
4.	4.		The New Me	4 months
5.	9.		The Nickel Boys	2 months
6.	–		Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories	1 month
7.	6.		The Golden State	5 months
8.	–		Inland	1 month
9.	–		The Need	1 month
10.	–		The Memory Police	1 month

Major shakeups this month with fully half of the Top Ten being populated by newcomers. Led by Olga Tokarczuk, whose novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead has skyrocketed up to second position on our list, the pack also includes J. Robert Lennon’s Pieces for the Left Hand, Téa Obreht’s Inland, Helen Phillips’s The Need, and Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police. Welcome, all. For the record, four of these five were listed in our Great Second-Half 2019 Book Preview.

Tokarczuk’s ascent up our list makes sense, as “mystical detective novel[s]” are usually sure to excite, but as Gabe Habash explained in his review for our site:

… with Tokarczuk behind the murder mystery, the whodunit is a sort of Trojan horse, a container for her to explore, with characteristic complexity and rigor, a whole host of deeper concerns, including animal rights, morality, fate, and how one life fits into the world around it. For her, simply finding out the identity of the murderer would be boring.

Meanwhile, something interesting is happening with Pieces for the Left Hand and The Need: the author of the latter reviewed the former’s work for our site last month. In her piece, Helen Phillips dubbed J. Robert Lennon’s Pieces for the Left Hand “the best book you’ve never read,” but obviously that statement’s not so true anymore. The strength of that review shot both works into this month’s Top Ten.

Two of this month’s new titles filled spaces vacated by The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms and Educated, both of which graduated to our Hall of Fame. The other three newcomers replaced Slave Old Man, Becoming, and Conversations with Friends, each of which dropped out of the running.

This month’s near misses included: How to Be an Antiracist and Ducks, Newburyport. See Also: Last month’s list.