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The Millions Top Ten: October 2016

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. 3. cover The Sellout 3 months
2. 4. cover Ninety-Nine Stories of God 4 months
3. – cover The Trespasser 1 month
4. 5. cover Zero K 6 months
5. 6. cover Barkskins 5 months
6. 7. cover The Underground Railroad 2 months
7. 10. cover Pond 2 months
8. 9. cover Here I Am 2 months
9. 8. cover Innocents and Others 4 months
10. – cover Commonwealth 1 month

How to rule The Millions‘s monthly Top Ten list:

  1. Write and publish a great book.
  2. Have the book’s protagonist’s voice praised for being “as appealing, erudite, and entertaining as any since Alexander Portnoy’s.”
  3. Win the Man Booker Prize.

Congratulations, Paul Beatty, you’ve done hit the trifecta!

We also welcome two newcomers to our list this month: Tana French’s The Trespasser and Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth, both of which had previously been featured on our Most Anticipated list.

French’s novel, the sixth in her Dublin Murder Squad series, focuses on the murder of a young woman ostensibly preparing for a date. Around here at The Millions, it’s tough to pick a resident Tana French expert – both Janet Potter and Edan Lepucki hold legitimate claims to that title — so site readers interested in a taste of French’s work should start by reading the author’s recent interview for our site, focusing on her penchant for using police interrogations as literary devices; Lepucki’s piece on French’s plotting; a conversation between both Edan and Janet about French’s writing; and the author in her own words recounting her Year in Reading.

Patchett’s work, too, is familiar to Millions staffers and readers alike. In her blurb for our Most Anticipated list, Lepucki wrote of Commonwealth:

A new novel by the bestselling author of gems like Bel Canto and State of Wonder is certainly a noteworthy publishing event. This time, Patchett, who also owns Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tenn., takes on a more personal subject, mapping multiple generations of a family broken up by divorce and patched together, in new forms, by remarriage. Commonwealth begins in the 1960s, in California, and moves to Virginia and beyond, spanning many decades.

Meanwhile, this month we graduate two Top Ten mainstays to our Hall of Fame: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot. Fare thee well in Valhalla!

This month’s near misses included: The Girls, Heroes of the Frontier, Signs Preceding the End of the World, The Nest, and The Unseen World. See Also: Last month’s list.

The post The Millions Top Ten: October 2016 appeared first on The Millions.



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