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.
3.
My Brilliant Friend
5 months
2.
8.
All the Light We Cannot See
6 months
3.
5.
The Strange Library
5 months
4.
7.
Dept. of Speculation
5 months
5.
6.
The David Foster Wallace Reader
4 months
6.
10.
The Buried Giant
2 months
7.
9.
Loitering: New and Collected Essays
4 months
8.
–
The First Bad Man: A Novel
1 month
9.
–
The Girl on the Train
1 month
10.
–
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
1 month
Major shake-ups this month as we bid adieu to three Top Ten fixtures of the past six months. After half a year of consistent success, Michael Schmidt’s door-stopping biography of the novel goes to our Hall of Fame, along with Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. This is the third time a Millions staffer has had their own work graduate to the site’s Hall of Fame, and in so doing, Emily St. John Mandel joins site founder C. Max Magee (The Late American Novel) and site writer Mark O’Connell (Epic Fail) on the list.
How fitting it is, too, that in our first Springtime Top Ten, we welcome three new, fresh additions to our list!
Checking in at #8 is Miranda July’s The First Bad Man, which was previewed in our Great 2015 Book Preview. July was also interviewed for our site in January, and at the time she described the inspiration for her novel in terms sure to salt the wound of anyone who’s ever struggled with writer’s block:
Well, the inspiration came very suddenly. I literally just had the idea on a long drive: of Cheryl and Clee, and their relationship and how it changed. I even knew that there would be a baby at the end and that Cheryl would end up alone with it. So that all came in a few minutes, which was very lucky and I still thank the gods for that.
Next on our list is Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, which was recently shouted out by Jon Ronson in his By the Book column for the New York Times Book Review. Hawkins’s novel has been described elsewhere as “an ingenious slant on the currently fashionable amnesia thriller,” and “a gripping, down-the-rabbit-hole thriller.”
Keeping with our “Spring” motif, we also welcome Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up to our April list, most likely as we all begin in earnest to at least think about finally doing some Spring cleaning. In her review, our own Janet Potter noted that Kondo’s work lays out “a method for cleaning and reorganizing your home that might be crazy and might be brilliant, but works either way.”
Next month, we should clear up at least one spot for another newcomer. Will it be one of these “Near Misses” at the bottom of this post, or will it be something else entirely?
Near Misses: To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, My Struggle: Book 1, An Untamed State, The Paying Guests and Everything I Never Told You. See Also: Last month’s list.
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