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.
| This Month | Last Month | Title | On List | |
| 1. | 1. |  |
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead | 6 months |
| 2. | 2. |  |
The Memory Police | 6 months |
| 3. | 3. |  |
The Topeka School | 4 months |
| 4. | 5. |  |
Ducks, Newburyport |
4 months |
| 5. | 4. |  |
Inland | 6 months |
| 6. | 7. |  |
The Hotel Neversink |
3 months |
| 7. | 9. |  |
Trick Mirror | 2 months |
| 8. | 6. |  |
Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories | 5 months |
| 9. | – |  |
Night Boat to Tangier | 1 month |
| 10. | – |  |
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous | 1 month |
The new year brings slight change to the top-half of our Top Ten. The books in fourth and fifth position swapped places, bumping Ducks, Newburyport up a spot, but otherwise 2020 begins just as 2019 ended: with Olga Tokarczuk in first place.
Elsewhere on the list, things get more interesting. Both Jia Tolentino and Adam O’Fallon Price saw their works rise a couple spots: Trick Mirror from ninth to seventh; The Hotel Neversink from seventh to sixth. Bravo, both.
Speaking of cheers, Colson Whitehead’s latest novel, The Nickel Boys, capped off six straight appearances on our Top Ten by ascending to our Hall of Fame. It’s the second time Whitehead has reached the Hall. The Underground Railroad made it in 2017. On the other hand, The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, dropped out of our list.
Filling the two free spots are Ocean Vuong and Kevin Barry, as On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous moves from perennial placement in our “Near Misses” to 10th position, and Night Boat to Tangier rides two mentions from our Year in Reading series into the ninth spot. Both Daniel Levin Becker and our own Bill Morris sung its praises. It “wrap[s] inventive thickets of idiom and fragment around affecting tales of parenthood and loss” wrote Becker. “It provides all the pleasures his fans have come to expect, including pyrotechnical language, a delicious stew of high lit and low slang, lovable bunged-up characters, rapturous storytelling, and a fair bit of the old U(ltra) V(iolence)” wrote Morris.
This month’s near misses included: Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, A Long Petal of the Sea, How to Be an Antiracist, and Quichotte. See Also: Last month’s list.
