The Millions Top Ten: July 2021

August 12, 2021 | 4 books 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 July.

This Month Last Month Title On List
1. 2. cover Klara and the Sun 5 months
2. 3. cover Fake Accounts 6 months
3. 4. cover The Copenhagen Trilogy 5 months
4. 8. cover The Great Mistake 2 months
5. 10. cover Subdivision 3 months
6. 7. cover Outlawed
4 months
7. 9. cover Women and Other Monsters 3 months
8. cover Craft and the Real World 2 months
9. cover The House on Vesper Sands 1 month
10. cover The Committed 1 month

Three books head to our Hall of Fame this month, and several books swapped places. Basically, our Top Ten did the Cha-Cha Slide. (“Slide to the left / slide to the right / criss-cross!”)

Before we welcome the new additions, let’s take it back now, y’all. After six months of strong showings, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, No One Is Talking About This, and Detransition, Baby have each graduated. It’s the first time for Patricia Lockwood and Torrey Peters, but it’s the fourth book George Saunders has sent to our Hall: Tenth of December made it in ’13, Fox 8 in ’14, and Lincoln in the Bardo in ’17. (“Everybody clap your hands!”)

The new books on this month’s list are The Committed, The House on Vesper Sands, and Craft and the Real Worldthe latter returning after a one-month absence. In a piece for our site early this year, Neelanjana Banerjee called Craft and the Real World “a blueprint for a way forward to build better writing programs, and thus a new kind of writer and teacher who can imagine beyond a structure that often hurt them and left them in need of repair.”

Among the near misses this month are Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch and Dana Spiotta’s Whereabouts. The Millions interviewed both authors last month, and you can read those here, and here, respectively.

That’s all for now, so cha cha real smooth until next month.

This month’s near misses included: Nightbitch, Whereabouts, Vernon Subutex, Great Circle and Wayward. 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.