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 October.
| This Month | Last Month | Title | On List | |
| 1. | 10. |  |
The House on Vesper Sands | 4 months |
| 2. | 1. |  |
The Great Mistake | 5 months |
| 3. | 5. |  |
Bewilderment | 2 months |
| 4. | 6. |  |
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus | 3 months |
| 5. | 2. |  |
Beautiful World, Where Are You | 2 months |
| 6. | 3. |  |
The Magician |
2 months |
| 7. | – |  |
Crossroads | 1 month |
| 8. | 9. |  |
Subdivision | 6 months |
| 9. | – |  |
A Calling for Charlie Barnes | 1 month |
| 10. | 4. |  |
The Book of Form and Emptiness | 2 months |
Can lists… listen? For months I’ve exclaimed our Top Ten’s consistency. The titles and their order have resisted change. Newcomers are as sporadic as they are welcome.
Well, no more. Like the goo in Ghostbusters 2, which animates in proportion to how much it’s heckled, our Top Ten converted months of my jibes into total metamorphosis. First place this month belongs to Paraic O’Donnell’s The House on Vesper Sands, which last month held… last. Down is up, which means up is also down. Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness moved from fourth to 10th. In between, two of last month’s top-three books—Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World… and Colm Tóibín’s The Magician—shifted into the middle this month.
If not my digs, then what shuffled the deck? If I possessed such unknowable answers, I’d be doing something else.
Some things held steady, though. Millions readers were so lathered up by Ed Simon’s piece about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work that Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus rocketed onto our list, and three months later it’s not just hanging on; it’s climbing. Likewise, Millions readers welcomed Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel Crossroads onto this month’s list, which is fitting since Franzen’s made it to our site’s Hall of Fame three times. There’s comfort in stability, is there not?
Lastly, Joshua Ferris’s A Calling for Charlies Barnes entered our list in ninth position this month, after hovering in the “Near Misses” for a time. On our site last August, David Aaron wrote that “if this is not quite Ferris’s silliest work, it feels like his most personal.” Evidently, Millions readers were intrigued.
This month’s near misses included: Harlem Shuffle, Craft in the Real World, and Fierce Little Thing. See Also: Last month’s list.
