As the year winds down, it’s a great opportunity for readers to catch up on some of the most-read pieces from The Millions during the year. We’ll divide the most popular posts on The Millions into two categories, beginning with the 20 most popular pieces published on the site in 2016.
1. Our pair of Most Anticipated posts were popular among readers looking for something new to read. We also ran not one but two non-fiction previews. Our 2017 book preview is coming soon.
2. An Invitation to Hesitate: John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’ at 70: Christian Kriticos brought our attention to the 70th anniversary of a watershed moment in 20th-century journalism, the New Yorker’s devotion of an entire issue to John Hersey’s powerful recounting of what happened in Hiroshima on the day the bomb fell. “In our current age, in which every refresh of the Web browser brings a new story of tragedy, to be forgotten as quickly as it appeared, it seems that ‘Hiroshima’ is as relevant as ever.”
3. Dear Any Soldier: Vonnegut during Wartime: Odie Lindsey penned a powerful reflection on discovering fiction — becoming a reader in a war zone — through a box of Kurt Vonnegut novels shipped in an “Any Soldier” care package to Operation Desert Storm, 1991.
4. Are you a planner or a pantser? Akilesh Ayyar broke down the two ways to write a novel: plot it all out meticulously or fly by the seat of your pants. Virginia Woolf? Planner. Mark Twain? Pantser. Vladimir Nabokov? Planner. James Joyce? Pantser of course.
5. In July, the literary set was buzzing about (and rolling their eyes over) The New York Times T Magazine’s publication of a series of emails between Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer. Our own Jacob Lambert then uncovered Portman’s correspondence with none other than Cormac McCarthy.
6. Somehow, your typical summer escapist reading didn’t feel right for 2016. Our own Claire Cameron took stock of things – and some great new books on offer – and crafted A Summer Reading List for Wretched Assholes Who Prefer to Wallow in Someone Else’s Misery. (Spoiler alert: this list works any time of year, as it turns out.)
7. Attention all poetry haters: Our own Nick Ripatrazone made this list just for you.
8. Ernest Hemingway: Middlebrow Revolutionary: Our own Michael Bourne penned a compelling and provocative reconsideration of Papa Hemingway that feels even more relevant today. “Like many men who pride themselves on their toughness and self-reliance, Hemingway was almost comically insecure and prone to betray anyone who had the effrontery to do him a favor.”
9. Infinite Jest in the Age of Addiction: We continue to plumb the depths of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. In July, Mike Broida wrote about Wallace’s masterpiece as a “grand overture on humans and addiction.”
10. The Private Library: What Books Reveal About Their Readers: As Millions readers surely know, there is little more illuminating about a person than that person’s library. With that in mind, Andrew Pippos looked for treasures in the libraries of history’s greatest literary minds, from Gustave Flaubert to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Flannery O’Connor.
11. Only partway done as I compile this list, our star-studded Year in Reading has been a big hit across the internet.
12. In February, Gerald Howard, vice president and executive editor of Doubleday, took us into the halls and history of New York publishing. In this clubby world, much has changed since Alfred Knopf published Thomas Mann. But there are constants: ego, insecurity, irrational exuberance…
13. An Essential Human Respect: Reading Walt Whitman During Troubled Times: E. Thomas Finan’s piece is one I have returned to more than once since we published it in September. “Rather than succumbing to self-righteous demonization, Whitman illustrated the power of a human empathy that transcends ideological bellicosity.”
14. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Amateur Auction Theorist: In this curious bit of history, Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan relate how Goethe invented a new kind of auction to avoid being swindled by his publisher. Alas, Goethe’s agent had other plans.
15. You can call yourself a planner or a pantser (see above), but the fact remains that there is no handbook for being a writer. In June, Marcia DeSanctis tried to make sense of the unbounded but messy life of the writer.
16. Books Should Send Us Into Therapy: On The Paradox of Bibliotherapy: Books are often recommended for therapeutic purposes: Read this book and it will help you solve this problem. In November, James McWilliams argued that instead, “We should allow books to cause more trouble in our lives.”
17. Do you notice what characters are wearing in novels? Do you notice how often authors get this wrong? Rosa Lyster does.
18. Look, it probably wasn’t you who wiped boogers on Jacob Lambert’s library book, but we can’t be sure, right? Just read this.
19. “Literature about sex, no matter who has written it, is almost always terrible, and everybody knows it,” writes Drew Nellins Smith. And yet authors keep churning out sex scenes.
20. I’ll be de’ed. In What the Deuce: The Curse Words of Charles Dickens, Brian Kozlowski instructs on how the giant of the Victorian era was able to channel his more impolitic urges with a clever — and uniquely Dickensian — array of invented epithets.
Next we’ll look at a number of older pieces that Millions readers return to again and again. This list of top “evergreens” comprises pieces that went up before 2016 but continued to find new readers.
1. Dickens’s Best Novel? Six Experts Share Their Opinions: Our own Kevin Hartnett polled the experts to discover the best on offer from the prolific 19th century master.
2. The Starting Six: On the Remarkable Glory Days of Iowa Girls Basketball: Lawrence Tabak’s lovely longform on the basketball variant that was once an Iowa obsession.
3. Readers of Laurent Binet’s HHhH have been turning up to read the story of the section he excised from the novel as well as the missing pages themselves, which we published exclusively.
4. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? 8 Experts on Who’s Greater: Readers also returned to Kevin Hartnett’s Russian lit throwdown, for which he asked eight scholars and avid lay readers to present their cases for Tolstoy or Dostoevsky as the king of Russian literature.
5. Shakespeare’s Greatest Play? 5 Experts Share Their Opinions: Yet another of Hartnett’s roundtables asked five experts to name the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays.
6. A Year in Reading 2015: 2015’s series stayed popular in 2016.
7. Pansexual Free-for-All: My Time As A Writer of Kindle Erotica: It’s a brave new world for writers on the make. Matthew Morgan tried his hand in the weird, wild world of self-published erotica and in the process introduced us to “shape-shifter sex creatures that could be anything from dolphins to bears to whales” and other oddities.
8. How To Introduce an Author: We’ve all seen them — awkward, long-winded, irrelevant. Bad author introductions mar readings every day in this great country of ours. For four years now, would be emcees have been turning to Janet Potter’s guide on how to not screw up the reading before it even starts.
9. We Cast The Goldfinch Movie so Hollywood Doesn’t Have To: Word of a film adaptation gave us all the excuse we needed to keep talking about Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. Our own Janet Potter and Edan Lepucki saved everyone a lot of trouble and went ahead and put together a cast for the movie.
10. Sam Anderson and David Rees decided, for science, to do a deep dive on Dan Brown’s thriller Inferno. The result was Dumbest Thing Ever: Scribbling in the Margins of Dan Brown’s Inferno and some of the funniest marginalia you’ll ever read.
