Related Books:
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 October.
| This Month | Last Month | Title | On List | |
| 1. | 5. |  |
Sirens & Muses | 3 months |
| 2. | 4. |  |
Sea of Tranquility | 6 months |
| 3. | – |  |
The Passenger | 1 month |
| 4. | 3. |  |
Either/Or |
5 months |
| 5. | 7. |  |
Forbidden City | 4 months |
| 6. | 6. |  |
The Angel of Rome: And Other Stories | 4 months |
| 7. | 8. |  |
Paradais | 5 months |
| 8. | 9. |  |
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow | 3 months |
| 9. | 10. |  |
When We Were Bright and Beautiful | 2 months |
| 10. | – |  |
Shrines of Gaiety | 1 month |
Two new titles make their debuts on October’s list: Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety, one of last month’s “near misses,” joins us in tenth position, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger arrives in third.
For each of the past five years, when we’ve put together our site’s Most Anticipated lists, I’ve seen placeholders in the planning document for “Cormac McCarthy’s New Orleans novel????” Each year, we’d sift through whispers to see what was up, when it was coming, if it was even being finished. Each year, we punted it to the next list. Well, finally, it felt real last summer, and there it was on our Second-Half Preview. Now, one of our longest awaited books is finally on shelves. (Your move, John Jeremiah Sullivan.) And it’s actually part of a “a fascinating diptych,” as Seth L. Riley put it in a recent review for our site.
Of course, our list opened spaces for these two new books because two other books graduated to our site’s Hall of Fame. Congratulations to Sequoia Nagamatsu and Matt Bell for earning our site’s highest honor—a first for each one—with the success of How High We Go in the Dark and Refuse to Be Done, respectively.
Next month, there should be space for yet another newcomer… or as always, potentially more.
This month’s near misses included: The Tartar Steppe, The Hurting Kind, Cocoon, How to Read Now (Essays), and Properties of Thirst. See Also: Last month’s list.
