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 March.
This Month | Last Month | Title | On List | |
1. | 1. | Ulysses: An Illustrated Edition | 3 months | |
2. | 4. | The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook | 2 months | |
3. | 6. | When We Cease to Understand the World | 3 months | |
4. | 2. | The Morning Star |
4 months | |
5. | 7. | The Penguin Modern Classics Book | 3 months | |
6. | 3. | Cloud Cuckoo Land | 6 months | |
7. | 5. | These Precious Days: Essays | 5 months | |
8. | 9. | Matrix: A Novel | 6 months | |
9. | 10. | Beautiful World, Where Are You | 6 months | |
10. | – | Bewilderment | 6 months |
Millions readers, solve a math problem for me. We have 10 titles on our list. One—written by Ruth Ozeki—ascends to our site’s Hall of Fame, opening up a spot for another book to fill. And yet in March 2022, no newcomers joined our list. How can that be?
You see, it’s a trick. This month’s newcomer is hardly a newcomer at all. This month, our list is rejoined by Richard Powers’s Bewilderment, which had a great run in our Top Ten from September through January before taking last month off. Now it’s back, and set to follow Ozeki in next month’s bumper crop of Hall of Fame titles. (I count four total, but here’s a caveat: I did my month’s quota of math in the first paragraph of this write-up.)
Elsewhere on our list, books shuffled. Lauren Groff’s Matrix moved from ninth to eighth. Ward Farnsworth’s Socratic Method moved from fourth to second. Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World moved from sixth to third, and scrambled my brain when I read it. All around, the world spun, flowers bloomed, and miseries swapped places with joy—or vice versa, as the case may be.
Next month, four spots will open. Next month, we’ll have more to discuss.
This month’s near misses included: Crossroads, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Intimacies, The Magician, and How High We Go in the Dark. See Also: Last month’s list.