We spend plenty of time here at 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 May.
| This Month | Last Month | Title | On List | |
| 1. | 1. |  |
Ulysses: An Illustrated Edition | 5 months |
| 2. | 2. |  |
The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook | 4 months |
| 3. | 4. |  |
The Penguin Modern Classics Book | 5 months |
| 4. | 3. |  |
When We Cease to Understand the World |
5 months |
| 5. | 5. |  |
The Morning Star | 6 months |
| 6. | 6. |  |
Refuse to Be Done | 2 months |
| 7. | 10. |  |
How High We Go in the Dark | 2 months |
| 8. | 8. |  |
Crossroads | 5 months |
| 9. | – |  |
Sea of Tranquility | 1 month |
| 10. | – |  |
Intimacies | 1 month |
Just one change to the top-half of this month’s list, and it’s a tiny one: When We Cease to Understand the World swapped places with The Penguin Modern Classics Book. This type of scarcely observable change has been notionally understood in the abstract for years, but it wasn’t until a team of pioneering physicists got together that its dynamics were fully understoo–this is a Benjamín Labatut joke and I need to bail before I get carried away.
The books in seventh through tenth positions changed more dramatically. How High We Go in the Dark rose three spots this month, and we also had two newcomers make the list.
Longtime Millions staffer Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel Sea of Tranquility debuts in ninth position. It’s “a work of literary science fiction in which Mandel crafts a tale of flawed and disparate characters—whose lives are unwittingly altered in time and space—yet linked by an anomalous glitch in time,” K.E. Lanning wrote in the introduction to her interview with St. John Mandel last month.
Rounding out this month’s list is Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, which Sinead O’Shea described in a review for our site as “an elegant and gripping story about a female interpreter who is thrust into one of the International Criminal Court’s high-profile cases.”
Next month we should get at least one more newcomer on our list, so stay tuned to find out which.
This month’s near misses included: Either/Or, Harlem Shuffle and The Collected Stories (William Trevor), Small Things Like These, and Shit Cassandra Saw: Stories. See Also: Last month’s list.
