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 June.
This Month |
Last Month |
Title | On List | |
1. | 1. | The Pale King | 4 months | |
2. | 4. | The Enemy | 2 months | |
3. | 2. | The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books | 5 months | |
4. | 3. | The Imperfectionists | 6 months | |
5. | 6. | Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric | 3 months | |
6. | 8. | The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry | 2 months | |
7. | 7. | Skippy Dies | 6 months | |
8. | 10. | The Hunger Games | 4 months | |
9. | – | A Moment in the Sun | 1 month | |
10. | – | Otherwise Known as the Human Condition | 1 month |
David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King is again in the top spot, but, interestingly, Christopher Hitchens’ "Kindle Single" The Enemy climbs further after its debut last month. The sudden proliferation of long-form journalism as ebook originals – Byliner has made a splash after releasing several of its own – will be an interesting trend to watch.
Debuting this month were filmmaker John Sayles’s massive and very well-recieved novel A Moment in the Sun and Geoff Dyer’s collection of essays Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. This is Dyer’s second book to crack our Top Ten, joining Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence.
Graduating to our Hall of Fame, meanwhile, are Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand and Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky.
Near Misses:The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, The Tiger’s Wife, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and Unfamiliar Fishes. See Also: Last month’s list