The Millions Top Ten: April 2020

May 11, 2020 | 1 book mentioned 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 April.

This Month Last Month Title On List
1. 5. cover The Glass Hotel 2 months
2. 3. cover The Hotel Neversink 6 months
3. 9. cover The City We Became 2 months
4. 6. cover Night Boat to Tangier
4 months
5. 4. cover Trick Mirror 5 months
6. 8. cover The Resisters
3 months
7. 7. cover The Mirror & the Light 2 months
8. cover On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous 3 months
9. 10. cover Interior Chinatown 3 months
10. cover Fleishman Is in Trouble 2 months

Two Millions staffers top this month’s list, while a third narrowly missed out on inclusion. Perhaps this achievement amidst a global pandemic is what Charles Dickens meant by “the best of times…the worst of times.”

Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel rose to first place this month; the book “explores what Mandel calls ‘the kingdom of money,'” wrote Adam O’Fallon Price in our March Book Preview. Meanwhile Price’s novel The Hotel Neversink rose to second place on this month’s list. Mandel didn’t preview Neversink for our March Book Preview, even though that would have been a nice bit of symmetry, but Bill Morris did call it a “rambunctious, ambitious, decades- and generations-jumping tale” in our Great Book Preview, and that’s probably better. Regardless, the facts are irrefutable: Millions readers love Millions staffers who write books with “Hotel” in their titles.

Elsewhere, two books rejoin the list after spending some time off of it. Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous rejoined for the first time since February, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble came back after debuting that same month. Their spots were opened up when The Topeka School and Ducks, Newburyport graduated to our Hall of Fame—a first-time distinction for both Ben Lerner and Lucy Ellmann.

Next month we look poised to open up at least one spot for a newcomer, and there’s only one place where you can find out which book it will be.

This month’s near misses included: The Moment of Tenderness, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, Sharks in the Time of Saviors, Tell It Slant, and Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in American Fiction. See 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.