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. | 5. | Train Dreams | 5 months | |
2. | 6. | Bring Up the Bodies | 2 months | |
3. | 7. | How to Sharpen Pencils | 3 months | |
4. | 8. | New American Haggadah | 4 months | |
5. | 9. | The Swerve: How the World Became Modern | 3 months | |
6. | – | The Patrick Melrose Novels | 1 month | |
7. | 10. | Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language | 3 months | |
8. | – | A Naked Singularity | 1 month | |
9. | – | Binocular Vision | 2 months | |
10. | – | The Flame Alphabet | 1 month |
Four books — John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, and Lewis Hyde’s The Gift — decamp for our Hall of Fame this month. The former three were brought to the attention of our readers during our Year in Reading series in December, while the latter anchored a holiday gift guide for writers.
With all those books departing, our new number one is Denis Johnson’s Pulitzer finalist Train Dreams. It also makes room for three newcomers on the list and a returning title, Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision. The debuts are Edward St Aubyn’s The Patrick Melrose Novels (reviewed here in February), A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava (profiled by Garth Hallberg) and The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus (we reviewed the book in early January and interviewed Marcus later in the month).
Near Misses: Leaving the Atocha Station, Open City, The Great Frustration, 11/22/63, and Gods Without Men. See Also: Last month’s list.