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 December.
| This Month |
Last Month |
Title | On List | |
| 1. | 4. |  |
The Novel: A Biography | 3 months |
| 2. | 2. |  |
Station Eleven | 3 months |
| 3. | 1. |  |
The Bone Clocks | 4 months |
| 4. | 6. |  |
Reading Like a Writer | 6 months |
| 5. | – |  |
My Brilliant Friend | 1 month |
| 6. | 7. |  |
The Narrow Road to the Deep North |
3 months |
| 7. | – |  |
The Strange Library | 1 month |
| 8. | 10. |  |
All the Light We Cannot See |
2 months |
| 9. | 3. |  |
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves |
6 months |
| 10. | – |  |
Dept. of Speculation | 1 month |
Ohio State over Alabama wasn’t the only New Year’s upset: in the first Top Ten of 2015, Millions readers propelled a mammoth, scholarly 1,200-page history of the novel ahead of David Mitchell’s latest. That’s right. The Novel: A Biography is our new number one. Let us all join hands as we usher in a new age dominated not by the Crimson Tide and kaleidoscopic fiction but instead by the Buckeyes and literary history. (Or you could read the review that started it all.)
And that’s not the only surprise this month, either. Two fixtures in our most recent Top Ten lists — Haruki Murakami and Karl Ove Knausgaard — saw their latest works — Colorless Tsukuru and My Struggle — drop out of our standings altogether. (Have no fear, Murakami fans: your darling remains on this month’s list with the debut of The Strange Library, which Buzz Poole recently described as a heavily illustrated 96-page paperback that “like … so much of Murakami’s fiction, questions the differences between what is real and what is not, and whether such a distinction even matters.”)
Moving along, it seems apparent that our recent Year in Reading series motivated a good number of Millions readers to purchase works by Elena Ferrante and Jenny Offill. In the case of Ferrante, whose My Brilliant Friend debuts this month in our list’s fifth spot, we probably have Charles Finch to thank. He’s the one who wrote, “I read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy this year. I read it twice, actually. It made me want to quit writing.” For her part, Offill’s Dept. of Speculation earned heaps of praise in the series entries from Rachel Fershleiser, Scott Cheshire, and Dinaw Mengestu. (And Sam Lipsyte, way back in ’13.)
Meanwhile our own Emily St. John Mandel maintains a strong presence on the list with Station Eleven, and next month we’ll likely see the graduation of two works— Reading Like a Writer and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves — to our Hall of Fame.
Near Misses: To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, My Struggle: Book 1, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Loitering: New and Collected Essays, and An Untamed State. See Also: Last month’s list.
