The Millions Top Ten: December 2021

January 12, 2022 | 3 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 December.

This Month Last Month Title On List
1. 1. cover The House on Vesper Sands 6 months
2. 3. cover The Book of Form and Emptiness 4 months
3. cover The Morning Star 1 month
4. 8. cover Cloud Cuckoo Land
3 months
5. 9. cover These Precious Days: Essays 2 months
6. 10. cover Beautiful World, Where Are You
3 months
7. 6. cover Crossroads 3 months
8. 4. cover Bewilderment 4 months
9. 7. cover Matrix: A Novel 3 months
10. 5. cover Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5 months

I need you to hold on. The surge is real, cases are rising, but the vaccines work. It’s decoupled: your likelihood of ending up in the hospital is reduced if you’re vaccinated, which is all along what the vaccines were supposed to do. But, remember: a small percentage of a bigger number can still produce a big number. We aren’t out of the woods.

Oh, right, we were talking about books. In that case, I still need you to hold on, Millions readers. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus remains on our list, but it’s in precarious position. We have the unprecedented chance to put a book from 1921 into the Hall of Fame, but we need two more strong showings from y’all. If you haven’t read Ed Simon’s piece on Ludwig Wittgenstein, you must. Here it is. Here’s a second link to it in case you didn’t click it the first time.

Carrying on. This month we bid farewell to Jonathan Lee’s The Great Mistake, which rode six straight strong showings into our site’s Hall of Famed sunset.

In its place, we welcome newcom—oh, no, wait we’ve seen you before, surely? Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose novel The Morning Star joins our ranks in the third spot. Knausgaard is no stranger to Millions readers but it may surprise you to learn he’s not yet made the Hall of Fame .

Will he this time? We’ll see.

This month’s near misses included: The Magician, A Calling for Charlie Barnes, Intimacies, Harlem Shuffle, and When We Cease to Understand the World. 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.