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 September.
| This Month | Last Month | Title | On List | |
| 1. | 1. |  |
Between the World and Me | 3 months |
| 2. | 7. |  |
A Little Life | 3 months |
| 3. | 2. |  |
Go Set a Watchman | 3 months |
| 4. | 8. |  |
Purity | 2 months |
| 5. | 3. |  |
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing | 6 months |
| 6. | 6. |  |
Book of Numbers | 4 months |
| 7. | – |  |
Fates and Furies | 1 month |
| 8. | – |  |
The Heart Goes Last | 1 month |
| 9. | 10. |  |
The Paying Guests | 4 months |
| 10. | 9. |  |
Satin Island | 5 months |
Our Hall of Fame grows to 101 titles strong this month, thanks to the ascension of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (#100) and Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train (#101). It’s the first appearance in the Hall for both authors.
In their place, we welcome Fates and Furies and The Heart Goes Last, the latest works from Lauren Groff and Margaret Atwood, respectively. The former should be especially familiar to Millions readers, as we shared the book’s opening lines on our site last March, and we interviewed Groff about her writing process (and why she feels ambivalent about Florida) more recently. Atwood, meanwhile, took part in our Year in Reading in 2010.
For the second consecutive month, Ta-Nahesi Coates’s Between the World and Me tops our list. It’s an honor that Coates should treasure because his year has otherwise been fairly uneventful for him. After all, he’s only won a MacArthur “genius grant,” been longlisted for the National Book Award, and announced a forthcoming Marvel comic. In other words: nothing that holds a candle to the honor of being named a Millions fan favorite.
Moving along: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life occupies this month’s number two spot. The book’s steady rise over the past three months — unlisted in July, #7 in August, and now runner-up — surprised me almost as much as it’s likely surprised our own Lydia Kiesling, who wrote of the work:
A Little Life has stayed with me, not because I found it so sad, but because I found it so strangely bad, and have spent significant time wondering if what I perceive to be its badness is in fact a function of a bold narrative experiment that, to quote James Wood on Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, “invents its own category of badness,” and thus deserves a very particular set of laurels.
Indeed, it’s as though a negative review from Lydia has the perverse effect of skyrocketing her victim’s works into the hands of Millions readers. (After all, this is the second time it’s happened…) Perhaps from now on publicists should refer to Lydia as the Literary Queen Midas?
Elsewhere on the list, Go Set a Watchman and that book on de-cluttering dropped one spot apiece, Franzen’s latest rose a bit, and works by Joshua Cohen, Sarah Waters, and Tom McCarthy held steady.
This month’s near misses included: Undermajordomo Minor, The Martian, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, The First Bad Man, and Wind/Pinball. See Also: Last month’s list.
