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The Millions Top Ten: August 2017

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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 August.

This Month
Last Month

Title
On List

1.
3.

Ill Will
5 months

2.
2.

American War
5 months

3.
4.

Men Without Women: Stories
4 months

4.
7.

Exit West
2 months

5.
10.

The Idiot
2 months

6.
8.

What We Lose

2 months

7.


The Seventh Function of Language: A Novel
1 month

8.


The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake
2 months

9.


Eileen
2 months

10.


The Changeling
1 month

 

Lots of action this month as our Hall of Fame absorbs three mainstays from the past six months: Lincoln in the Bardo, A Separation, and Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. This marks George Saunders’s third entry into the Hall of Fame. He’d previously reached those hallowed halls for Tenth of December and Fox 8.

Meanwhile, The Nix dropped from our list after two months of solid showings. If he’s reading this (because who isn’t?) then hopefully Nathan Hill can look to two other titles on this month’s list for solace. Both The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake as well as Otessa Moshfegh’s Eileen are examples of books that have graced our monthly Top Ten one month (June, in this case) only to drop out for another (July), and then reappear (August). If they can do it, so you can you, Nix fans!

The remaining two spots were filled by new novels from Laurent Binet and Victor LaValle.

The Seventh Function of Language: A Novel, which was highlighted in both installments of our Great 2017 Book Preview, was expected to provide “highbrow hijinks.” In her review for our site this month, Shivani Radhakrishnan confirms that it delivers in this respect. Calling Binet’s novel “a madcap sharply irreverent French theory mash-up that’s part mystery and part satire,” Radhakrishnan goes on to contextualize it among other works in detective fiction and theory, which, she writes, have a good deal in common and which, she writes, intertwine to great effect here:
The new book turns Roland Barthes’s accidental death in 1980 into a murder investigation set against French intellectual life. With a cast of characters that includes Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva with guest appearances by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Umberto Eco, and John Searle, it’s no surprise Binet’s book is way more dizzying than most detective stories. What is shocking, though, is how it manages to respect the theories and mock the theorists all at once.
The Changeling, too, was highlighted on this site in one of our monthly mini-previews. At the time, Lydia Kiesling implored readers to check out LaValle’s second novel, which she described as “a book that somehow manages to be a fairy tale, an agonizing parenting story, a wrenching metaphor for America’s foundational racist ills, and a gripping page-turner to usher in the summer.” If you’re still not sold, you can check out an excerpt from the book, or read our interview with the author from last year.

Skulking just beyond our list – like some expectant, lovelorn dolphin admiring a human home-wrecker as he swims – is Alissa Nutting’s Made for Love, which I reviewed a month ago, and which I encourage you all to buy and read so that this sentence makes sense.

This month’s other near misses included: The Art of Death: Writing the Final StoryHillbilly Elegy, Made for Love, Enigma Variations, and The Night Ocean. See Also: Last month’s list.

The Millions Top Ten: March 2015

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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 March.

This
Month
Last
Month

Title
On List

1.
1.

The Novel: A Biography
6 months

2.
2.

Station Eleven
6 months

3.
3.

My Brilliant Friend
4 months

4.
5.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

6 months

5.
7.

The Strange Library

4 months

6.
6.

The David Foster Wallace Reader

3 months

7.
9.

Dept. of Speculation
4 months

8.
8.

All the Light We Cannot See

5 months

9.
10.

Loitering: New and Collected Essays

3 months

10.


The Buried Giant
1 month

 

Well, folks, it’s happened. The enduring success of David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks has pushed the author to a Millions echelon so high that it’s never before been reached. That’s right: Mitchell is now the only author in site history to reach our hallowed Hall of Fame for three (count ’em!) different works.

And with The Bone Clocks joining his past works, Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Mitchell’s latest achievement puts him ahead of David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest,The Pale King), Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, This Is How You Lose Her), Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon TattooThe Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest), Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies), Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, Freedom), George Saunders (Tenth of December, Fox 8), and Dave Eggers (Zeitoun, The Circle), each of whom authored two Hall of Fame titles. Maybe this repeated success will be enough to coax him into a Year in Reading 2015 appearance. (ARE YOU LISTENING, PUBLICISTS?)

Joining this month’s list thanks to The Bone Clocks’s graduation is Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, The Buried Giant. It’s a book “about war and memory,” wrote Millions staffer Lydia Kiesling in her extremely personal review of the work for this site. “But it is also about love and memory, and you don’t need to have lived through an atrocity to get it.”

Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that our own Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which is poised to graduate to our Hall of Fame next month, was the recent winner of The Morning News’s annual Tournament of Books. (It beat out Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, which is also on our Top Ten.) The novel, which has earned the praise of George R. R. Martin, took the final match-up by a score of 15-2, which should be decisive enough to persuade all of you who haven’t yet bought the book to do so immediately.

Join us next month as we graduate three books and open the doors for three newcomers. Will they be among the “Near Misses” below, or will they be something new entirely?

Near Misses: My Struggle: Book 1, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, An Untamed State, The Paying Guests and The First Bad Man. See Also: Last month’s list.

A 2014 Cheat Sheet for All You New Kindle (and Other E-Reader) Owners

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With each new holiday season the reach of ereaders expands, as a new crop of Kindles, Nooks and iPads are fired up. The first thing to do is download a few books.

Just a few years after ebooks and ereaders first emerged as futuristic curiosity, they are fully mainstream now. Even among the avid, book-worshiping, old-school readers that frequent The Millions, ebooks are very popular. Looking at the statistics that Amazon provides us, 48% of all the books bought by Millions readers at Amazon after clicking on our links this year were Kindle ebooks. This is an uptick from last year, when the percentage was 45%. In 2012 it was 33% and the year before it was 25%. It seems almost fitting, given the tug-of-war between book and ebook partisans, that the numbers would eventually settle out near even, with neither format coming out the “winner.”

So, for all those readers unwrapping shiny new devices, here are some links to get you going.

For starters, The Millions published a pair of very highly regarded and very affordable ebook originals in 2013. If you are new to the ereader game, we hope you’ll pick up these titles:

Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever by Mark O’Connell ($1.99)

The Pioneer Detectives: Did a distant spacecraft prove Einstein and Newton wrong? by Konstantin Kakaes ($2.99)

They are also available on Apple and other platforms.

Here are some of the most popular ebooks purchased by Millions readers in 2014 (which you’ll see are very similar to our Hall of Fame and most recent top-ten which take into account books in all formats). Publishers appear to still be having luck pricing ebooks pricing near the magic $9.99 number that has been a focus for many in the industry (all prices as of this writing), though aggressive pricing on some backlist titles is clearly driving brisk sales. Occasional promotional pricing, a frequent occurrence in the Kindle store, has likely driven some of these sales as well.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt ($6.99)
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose ($1.99)
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter ($5.99)
Just Kids by Patti Smith ($8.62)
The Round House by Louise Erdrich ($8.61)
Tampa by Alissa Nutting ($9.78)
Fox 8 by George Saunders ($0.99)
A Highly Unlikely Scenario by Rachel Cantor ($9.99)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith ($6.99)
Underworld by Don Delillo ($11.74)
Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales by Ray Bradbury ($12.62)

Other potentially useful ebook links:

Editors’ Picks
Best of 2014
Top 100 Paid and Free
Kindle Singles

And in this fractured ebook landscape, you’ve also got your NookBooks, Google ebooks, Apple ibooks, and the IndieBound ereader app that lets you buy ebooks from your favorite indie bookstore. Finally, don’t forget Project Gutenberg, the original purveyor of free ebooks (mostly out-of-copyright classics).

Happy Reading!

The Millions Top Ten: May 2014

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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 May.

This
Month
Last
Month

Title
On List

1.
1.

The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose
6 months

2.
2.

Beautiful Ruins
3 months

3.
5.

Bark: Stories
2 months

4.
3.

The Son
2 months

5.
4.

Just Kids

5 months

6.
8.

Eleanor & Park
2 months

7.
6.

Well-Read Women: Portraits of Fiction’s Most Beloved Heroines
2 months

8.
9.

The Good Lord Bird

2 months

9.


A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide to Saving the World
1 month

10.
10.

Jesus’ Son: Stories
2 months

 

In order to graduate to our Hall of Fame, books must remain on the Millions Top Ten for more than six months. The feat has only been accomplished by 82 books in the series’s five year history. Within that subset of hallowed tomes, though, eight authors have attained an even higher marker of success: they’ve reached the Hall of Fame more than once. This accomplishment is remarkable for two reasons: 1) the Top Ten typically favors heavily marketed new releases, so it means that these eight authors have more than once produced blockbusters in the past few years; and 2) because Top Ten graduates must remain on our monthly lists for over half a year before ascending to the Hall of Fame, that means their books must be popular enough to have sustained success. (In other words, marketing only gets you far.)

The names of these eight authors should be familiar to Millions readers, of course. They belong to some of the most successful writers of the past 25 years: David Foster Wallace* (Infinite Jest, The Pale King), Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, This Is How You Lose Her), Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon TattooThe Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest), David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet), Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies), Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, Freedom), George Saunders (Tenth of December, Fox 8), and — as of this month — Dave Eggers (Zeitoun, The Circle).

(*David Foster Wallace has the unique distinction, actually, of having two of his own books in our Hall of Fame in addition to a biography written about him.)

Even money would seem to indicate that Alice Munro is poised to join this esteemed group next. Her Selected Stories graduated to the Hall of Fame shortly after her Nobel Prize was awarded in 2013, and her collection, The Beggar Maid, has been holding fast ever since. Meanwhile, the surprise re-emergence of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, which has been hovering at the bottom of the Top Ten lists these past two months, indicates that maybe he’ll reach that group soon as well. His novella, Train Dreams, graduated in August of 2012.

Changing gears a bit: the lone new addition to our Top Ten this month in the form of Rachel Cantor’s mouthful of a novel, A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide to Saving the World. The book, which was published last month, was featured in our Great 2014 Book Preview, during which time Millions staffer Hannah Gersen posed the eternal question, “It’s got time travel, medieval kabbalists, and yes, pizza. What more can you ask for?”

What more, indeed?

Near Misses: Little Failure: A MemoirAmericanahStories of Anton Chekhov, My Struggle: Book 1, and Tampa. See Also: Last month’s list.

The Millions Top Ten: January 2014

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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 January.

This
Month
Last
Month

Title
On List

1.
1.

The Goldfinch
4 months

2.
2.

Selected Stories
4 months

3.
3.

The Flamethrowers
4 months

4.
4.

The Luminaries
4 months

5.
6.

The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose
4 months

6.
7.

Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment
2 months

7.
8.

Bleeding Edge
5 months

8.
9.

The Lowland
4 months

9.
10.

The Interestings
5 months

10.


Just Kids
1 month

 

Two books graduated to our Hall of Fame in January. We’re very proud to bestow the honor on our ebook original The Pioneer Detectives by Konstantin Kakaes. The book, which debuted in July 2013, is an ambitious work of page-turning reportage, the kind of journalism we all crave but that can often be hard to find. Filled with brilliant insights into how scientific discoveries are made and expertly edited by our own Garth Hallberg, The Pioneer Detectives is a bargain at $2.99. We hope you’ll pick it up if you haven’t already. Pioneer is joined in the Hall of Fame by another ebook orginal, George Saunders’s $0.99 short story Fox 8, which returned to our Top 10 for a seventh month in January after missing the list in December and therefore qualifies for the Hall.

Other than that, the list is positively gridlocked with several books staying put, including Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch atop the list. Our lone debut is unexepected: Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids. The National Book award-winning title has been popular among our readers for quite a while and was a “Near Miss” for several months on our list as recently as March 2011. The book likely got a boost thanks to Garth’s mention in his Year in Reading in December.

Incidentally, this also means that with the exception of Thomas Pynchon and the group-authored Draw it With Your Eyes Closed, our list is made up entirely of books by women.

Near Misses: The Circle, Eleanor & Park, The Son, Night Film, and Well-Read Women: Portraits of Fiction’s Most Beloved Heroines. See Also: Last month’s list.

The Millions Top Ten: December 2013

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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.
6.

The Goldfinch
3 months

2.
1.

Selected Stories
3 months

3.
2.

The Flamethrowers
3 months

4.
5.

The Luminaries
3 months

5.
3.

The Pioneer Detectives
6 months

6.
7.

The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose
3 months

7.


Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment
1 month

8.
9.

Bleeding Edge
4 months

9.
10.

The Lowland
3 months

10.


The Interestings
4 months

 

To start the new year, we’ve made some minor changes to how we calculate our list. Basically, we’ve added a slight penalty for lower-priced books because we were finding that spikes in sales of cheaper short-format books (e.g. "Kindle Singles") and aggressive promotional pricing of ebooks was skewing the list a bit. The change had no dramatic impact on the December list other than that it knocked George Saunders’s $0.99 short story Fox 8 out of our top 10.
The rest of the big changes were driven by our 2013 Year in Reading. Some books that were already popular with our readers got a lot of love in the series, including Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch which surged into the top spot after three contributors named the book as a favorite read of 2013. Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings was also a popular name in the series, and that helped return the book to the Top Ten after a few months off the list. Rachel Kushner was the runaway favorite in our series for The Flamethrowers, though the book dropped a spot to number three.
Our lone debut is a very unusual title. Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment is a slim collection, the result of several art teachers being asked to contribute the best art assignments they’ve ever heard of. Hannah Gersen included the book in her list of offbeat gifts for writers last month.
Finally, the contentious Taipei by Tao Lin graduates to our Hall of Fame. The book was the subject of a famously negative review here that perhaps not so paradoxically seemed to get a lot of people interested in the book.
Near Misses: The Circle, Night Film, Eleanor & Park, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, and MaddAddam. See Also: Last month’s list.

A 2013 Cheat Sheet for All You New Kindle (And Other Ereader) Owners

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With each new holiday season the reach of ereaders expands, as a new crop of Kindles, Nooks and iPads are fired up. The first thing to do is download a few books.

Just a few years after ebooks and ereaders first emerged as futuristic curiosity, they are fully mainstream now. Even among the avid, book-worshiping, old-school readers that frequent The Millions, ebooks are very popular. Looking at the statistics that Amazon provides us, 45% of all the books bought by Millions readers at Amazon after clicking on our links this year were Kindle ebooks. Last year it was 33% and the year before it was 25%, so the trend continues unabated.

So, for all those readers unwrapping shiny new devices, here are some links to get you going.

For starters, The Millions published a pair of very highly regarded and very affordable ebook originals in 2013. If you are new to the ereader game, we hope you’ll pick up these titles:

Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever by Mark O’Connell ($1.99)

The Pioneer Detectives: Did a distant spacecraft prove Einstein and Newton wrong? by Konstantin Kakaes ($2.99)

They are also available on Apple and other platforms.

Here are some of the most popular ebooks purchased by Millions readers in 2013 (which you’ll see are very similar to our Hall of Fame and most recent top-ten which take into account books in all formats). Publishers appear to still be having luck pricing ebooks pricing above the magic $9.99 number that has been a focus for many in the industry (all prices as of this writing).

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt ($7.50)
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner ($10.99)
Selected Stories by Alice Munro ($10.74)
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton ($8.59)
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon ($10.99)
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri ($9.99)
Tenth of December by George Saunders ($8.99)
Fox 8 by George Saunders ($0.99)
The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer ($8.99)
Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda ($11.04)
MaddAdam by Margaret Atwood ($1.99)

Other potentially useful ebook links:

Editors’ Picks
Best of 2012
Top 100 Paid and Free
Kindle Singles

And in this fractured ebook landscape, you’ve also got your NookBooks, Google ebooks, Apple ibooks, and the IndieBound ereader app that lets you buy ebooks from your favorite indie bookstore. Finally, don’t forget Project Gutenberg, the original purveyor of free ebooks (mostly out-of-copyright classics) available for years.

Happy Reading!

The Millions Top Ten: November 2013

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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 November.

This
Month
Last
Month

Title
On List

1.
1.

Selected Stories
2 months

2.
2.

The Flamethrowers
2 months

3.
3.

The Pioneer Detectives
5 months

4.
4.

Taipei
6 months

5.
5.

The Luminaries
2 months

6.
8.

The Goldfinch
2 months

7.
6.

The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose
2 months

8.
7.

Fox 8
5 months

9.
9.

Bleeding Edge
3 months

10.


The Lowland
2 months

 

There wasn’t much action on our list November as the top 5 stayed unchanged. Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch was the big mover, jumping from the eighth spot to the sixth.
The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson graduates to our illustrious Hall of Fame after a six-month run on the list that was initially spurred by the book’s Pulitzer win earlier this year. That departure makes room for the return of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland
Near Misses: Night Film, Visitation Street, The Interestings, MaddAddam and Dear Life. See Also: Last month’s list.

The Millions Top Ten: October 2013

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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 October.

This
Month
Last
Month

Title
On List

1.


Selected Stories
1 month

2.


The Flamethrowers
1 month

3.
1.

The Pioneer Detectives
4 months

4.
2.

Taipei
5 months

5.


The Luminaries
1 month

6.


The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose
1 month

7.
3.

Fox 8
4 months

8.


The Goldfinch
1 month

9.
5.

Bleeding Edge
2 months

10.
4.

The Orphan Master’s Son
6 months

 

In October, we were in the thick of book prize season, and the announcements sent readers running to new books, resulting in a big shake-up on our list, led by new Nobel Laureate Alice Munro. Within minutes of the announcement, readers were finding our “Beginner’s Guide to Alice Munro“, penned by Ben Dolnick, author of Shelf-Love, an ebook original about Munro. Dolnick called Munro’s Selected Stories “the Munro book to read if you’re only willing to read one” and he singled out The Beggar Maid as “the Munro book to read if you’re only willing to read one but don’t like the idea of reading a literary greatest hits album.” Many readers took his advice and the former landed atop our list, while the latter ended up in the sixth spot.

Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers continued to win fans (here at The Millions, for example; we also interviewed her), but it was the book’s landing on the National Book Award shortlist that rocketed it to the second spot on our list.

There was also the Booker Prize. Fresh off a rave review here at The Millions, Eleanor Catton took home the Booker, and her big novel landed at #5 on our list.

And the last of our several debuts is Donna Tartt’s long-awaited The Goldfinch. No surprise there.

All these new books bumped five names from our list, collected here as this month’s Near Misses: Night Film, The Lowland, The Interestings, Visitation Street and MaddAddam. See Also: Last month’s list.

The Millions Top Ten: September 2013

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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.
2.

The Pioneer Detectives
3 months

2.
1.

Taipei
4 months

3.
7.

Fox 8
3 months

4.
5.

The Orphan Master’s Son
4 months

5.


Bleeding Edge
1 month

6.
10.

Night Film
2 months

7.
8.

Visitation Street
3 months

8.
9.

The Interestings
3 months

9.


MaddAddam
1 month

10.


The Lowland
1 month

This month our second ebook original The Pioneer Detectives moves into the top spot as the book continues to garner very positive reviews from readers. We hope you’ll pick it up if you haven’t already.

Meanwhile, our list sees a big shake up as three books graduate to our Hall of Fame:

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk: Ben Fountain’s book won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. Fountain appeared in our Year in Reading, and Edan Lepucki interviewed him in these pages last June.

Stand on Zanzibar: Ted Gioia penned a very popular piece about the remarkably prescient predictions contained within John Brunner’s book and readers ran to check it out.

The Middlesteins: Author Jami Attenberg made an appearance in our Year in Reading in December.

These graduates make room for three heavy-hitting debuts, all of which appeared in our big second-half preview: Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon, MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood (don’t miss Atwood’s appearance in our Year in Reading; we haven’t quite tracked down Pynchon yet for this), and The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri.

Near Misses: Vampires in the Lemon Grove, The Flamethrowers, Life After Life, They Don’t Dance Much and Telex from Cuba. See Also: Last month’s list.

The Millions Top Ten: August 2013

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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 August.

This
Month
Last
Month

Title
On List

1.
1.

Taipei
3 months

2.
9.

The Pioneer Detectives
2 months

3.
5.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
6 months

4.
2.

Stand on Zanzibar
6 months

5.
4.

The Orphan Master’s Son
4 months

6.
3.

The Middlesteins
6 months

7.
10.

Fox 8
2 months

8.
8.

Visitation Street
2 months

9.
6.

The Interestings
2 months

10.


Night Film
1 month

Tao Lin’s Taipei remains in our top spot. (For more on the book’s success in our Top Ten, take a look at my commentary on June’s list.) Meanwhile, our Millions Original The Pioneer Detectives by Konstantin Kakaes surges into the second spot and continues to win rave reviews from readers. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain was also a mover, landing in the third spot as it nears graduation to our illustrious Hall of Fame.

Our one debut this month is Marisha Pessl’s anticipated sophomore effort Night Film. Our own Bill Morris called the book a “stirring second act” but commenters have voiced strong disagreement.

Pessl bumps Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell from the Top Ten (at least for now).

Other Near Misses: They Don’t Dance Much, Speedboat, Wonder Boys and My Struggle: Book 1. See Also: Last month’s list.

The Millions Top Ten: July 2013

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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 July.

This
Month
Last
Month

Title
On List

1.
3.

Taipei
2 months

2.
4.

Stand on Zanzibar
5 months

3.
5.

The Middlesteins
5 months

4.
7.

The Orphan Master’s Son
3 months

5.
8.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
5 months

6.


The Interestings
1 month

7.
9.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove
4 months

8.


Visitation Street
1 month

9.


The Pioneer Detectives
1 month

10.


Fox 8
1 month

 

Big changes on our list this month as four titles graduate to our illustrious Hall of Fame. Let’s run through new Hall of Famers quickly:

Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever: As many of our readers are already aware, staff writer Mark O’Connell’s shorter-format ebook was The Millions’ first foray into ebook publishing. We have been thrilled by the great reader response. And, if you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, why not mark its graduation to the Hall of Fame by checking out this special, little book (for only $1.99!)

Tenth of December: 2013 opened with the book world agog over George Saunders’ newest collection. He famously graced the cover of the New York Times Magazine under the banner “Greatest Human Ever in the History of Ever” (or something like that) and the book figured very prominently in our first-half preview. Unsurprisingly, all the hype helped drive a lot of sales. It also led our own Elizabeth Minkel to reflect on Saunders and the question of greatness in a thoughtful essay.

Building Stories: Chris Ware has reached the point in his career (legions of fans, museum shows) where he can do whatever he wants. And what he wanted to do was produce a “book” the likes of which we hadn’t seen before, a box of scattered narratives to be delved into any which way the reader wanted, all shot through with Ware’s signature style and melancholy. Ware appeared in our Year in Reading last year with an unlikely selection. Mark O’Connell called Building Stories “a rare gift.”

Arcadia: Lauren Groff is another Millions favorite, though it took a bit longer for her book, first released in March 2012, to make our list. Our own Edan Lepucki interviewed Groff soon after the book’s release, and Groff later participated in our Year in Reading, discussing her “year of savage, brilliant, and vastly underrated female writers.”

That leaves room, then, for four debuts on this month’s list:

The Interestings: Though Meg Wolitzer is already a well-known, bestselling author, her big novel seems to be on the slow burn trajectory to breakout status, with the word-of-mouth wave (at least in the part of the world that I frequent), building month by month. That word of mouth was perhaps helped along the way by Edan Lepucki’s rollicking review, in which, among other things, she posited what it means for a “big literary book” to be written by someone other than a “big literary man.”

Visitation Street: Ivy Pochoda’s new thriller featured prominently in our latest preview and carries the imprimatur of Dennis Lehane. That seems to have been enough to land the book on our list.

The Pioneer Detectives: As one Millions Original graduates from our list, another arrives. The Pioneer Detectives, which debuted in the second half of July, is an ambitious work of page-turning reportage, the kind of journalism we all crave but that can often be hard to find. Filled with brilliant insights into how scientific discoveries are made and expertly edited by our own Garth Hallberg, The Pioneer Detectives is a bargain at $2.99. We hope you’ll pick it up.

Fox 8: And as one George Saunders work graduates from our list, another arrives. This one is an uncollected story, sold as an e-single.

Meanwhile, Tao Lin’s Taipei easily slides into our top spot. For more on the book’s unlikely success in our Top Ten, don’t miss my commentary for last month’s list.

Near Misses: They Don’t Dance Much, Speedboat, My Struggle: Book 1, The Flamethrowers and Life After Life. See Also: Last month’s list.

The Millions Top Ten: June 2013

- | 1

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.

Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever
6 months

2.
2.

Tenth of December
6 months

3.


Taipei
1 month

4.
4.

Stand on Zanzibar
4 months

5.
5.

The Middlesteins
4 months

6.
6.

Building Stories
6 months

7.
9.

The Orphan Master’s Son
2 months

8.
7.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
4 months

9.
8.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove
3 months

10.
10.

Arcadia
6 months

 

We had one debut on our list this month, and it may come as a surprise for readers who have been following the site. Our own Lydia Kiesling read Tao Lin’s Taipei and came away viscerally turned off by a book that has received quite a lot of attention both for its attempt to forge a new style and for the aura of its author, who has an army of followers and is, as New York once called him, “a savant of self-promotion.” Despite Lydia’s misgivings, the book has been on balance reviewed positively, including in the Times.
Still, Lydia’s review – negative as it was – was utterly compelling (Gawker thought so too), and because of that, as I watched the sales of Taipei pile up last month, I was not completely surprised. After all, the last target of a stirring and controversial pan (don’t miss the angry comments) at The Millions was Janet Potter’s fiery takedown of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, and two of those three of those books now sit in comfortable retirement in our Hall of Fame. In the case of Taipei, the lion’s share of credit of course goes to Lin for writing a book that readers are evidently very curious to read, but I think it is also true that a well crafted, properly supported, and strongly opinionated review like Lydia’s can have the odd effect of compelling the reader to see what all the fuss is about.
In fact, this phenomenon has been studied and a recent paper showed that, "For books by relatively unknown (new) authors, however, negative publicity has the opposite effect, increasing sales by 45%." (I think in the context of this study, it is fair to call Lin "relatively unknown." While Lin may be well-known among Millions readers, he is not a household name outside of certain households in Brooklyn, and when readers flocked to read the review from Gawker and other sites that linked to it, they may have been compelled to check the book out for themselves.) As we have known for a while at The Millions, to cover a book at all is to confer upon it that we believe the book is important, and whether you believe the book is "good" or "bad," Taipei was certainly worthy of our coverage.
Otherwise, June was another quiet month for our list with the top two positions unchanged, including Millions ebook Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever at number one, while An Arrangement of Light, Nicole Krauss’s ebook-only short story graduates to our Hall of Fame. Next month, things will get interesting on our list as we may see as many as four books graduate to the Hall of Fame, opening up plenty of room for newcomers.
Near Misses: Fox 8, The Interestings, All That Is, The Round House, and The Flamethrowers. See Also: Last month’s list.

The Millions Top Ten: May 2013

-

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 May.

This
Month
Last
Month

Title
On List

1.
1.

Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever
5 months

2.
2.

Tenth of December
5 months

3.
3.

An Arrangement of Light
6 months

4.
5.

Stand on Zanzibar
3 months

5.
4.

The Middlesteins
3 months

6.
6.

Building Stories
5 months

7.
7.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
3 months

8.
10.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove
2 months

9.


The Orphan Master’s Son
1 month

10.
8.

Arcadia
5 months

 

May was quiet for our list, with the top three positions unchanged, including Millions ebook Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever at number one.
Our one debut, an number eight, is Adam Johnson’s much lauded The Orphan Master’s Son, recent recipient of both the Pulitzer and the Rooster.
Johnson’s book pushes the David Foster Wallace essay collection Both Flesh and Not off the list.
Other Near Misses: Fox 8, The Round House, All That Is, and Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. See Also: Last month’s list.

The Millions Top Ten: April 2013

-

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 April.

This
Month
Last
Month

Title
On List

1.
1.

Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever
4 months

2.
2.

Tenth of December
4 months

3.
3.

An Arrangement of Light
5 months

4.
4.

The Middlesteins
2 month

5.
7.

Stand on Zanzibar
2 months

6.
5.

Building Stories
4 months

7.
8.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
2 months

8.
9.

Arcadia
4 months

9.
10.

Both Flesh and Not
5 months

10.


Vampires in the Lemon Grove
1 month

 

In September 2012, we interviewed Sadie Stein, one of the Paris Review editors behind Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story, a book that seems tailor-made to appeal to Millions readers. In it, a handful of accomplished short story writers — Ann Beattie, Jeffrey Eugenides, Joy Williams, and so on — were asked to pick a favorite story from the journal’s archive, then write a brief introduction explaining how the story spoke to them. After a six-month run, the book has now graduated to our Hall of Fame.
Otherwise, our list doesn’t see a whole lot of movement, with the top four positions unchanged, including Millions ebook Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever at number one.
Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove is our one debut this month. We’ve interviewed Russell twice, in 2011 and again early this year. Vampires was also featured in our big 2013 book preview.
Near Misses: The Round House, The Orphan Master’s Son, Fox 8, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, and Dear Life. See Also: Last month’s list.

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