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The Millions Top Ten: December 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 December.

This Month Last Month Title On List
1. – cover Norwegian by Night 1 month
2. 1. cover The Sellout 5 months
3. 3. cover The Trespasser 3 months
4. 4. cover The Underground Railroad 4 months
5. 5. cover Moonglow 2 months
6. 2. cover Ninety-Nine Stories of God 6 months
7. 7. cover Commonwealth 3 months
8. 8. cover Here I Am 4 months
9. – cover The North Water 1 month
10. – cover Swing Time 1 month

Richard Russo wasn’t kidding when he wrote in our Year in Reading series that the best novel he’d read this autumn was “a bit of a sleeper, though its fans are oh-so-passionate.” For evidence of said passion, look no further than the top-spot debut for Derek B. Miller’s Norwegian by Night on this month’s list. Billed by Russo as “one of those books that completely transcends its genre,” it focuses on a transplanted New Yorker suddenly on the run in Norway. “If you like those other Scandihoovian thriller writers,” Russo wrote, “this is your book.”

The rest of the December list remains largely unchanged from the one we saw in November, owing perhaps to the long tail of the aforementioned Year in Reading series, which will no doubt start influencing subsequent lists as early as next month. Meanwhile, we welcome two newcomers on the lower half of our list this month, which are likely to rise as the Year in Reading dust settles, and as holiday gift cards are spent.

In ninth position is Ian McGuire’s The North Water, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and named by the New York Times‘s editors as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year. The novel is a thriller set on a nineteenth-century Arctic whaling ship with a killer aboard, which sounds to this Top Ten writer like a very distinct flavor of Hell.

Zadie Smith’s Swing Time occupies the tenth spot. Smith’s novel, her fifth, is complicated. As Kaila Philo noted in her review for our site, its protagonist “has no name, no signifiers, no grounding, only to be figured out through her relationships, interactions, and circumstances.” She continues:

Our protagonist here is so nebulous she becomes an idea for the reader to grasp at and attempt to put together, like a puzzle made of stardust, but once the reader finishes the puzzle they’re left with a sparkling cloud reminiscent of nothing.

(Bonus: If you haven’t yet, you should read the text of Smith’s acceptance speech at the 2016 Welt Literature Prize.)

Lastly, Annie Proulx’s Barkskins graduates to our Hall of Fame this month, becoming the 20th title to ascend to those hallowed ranks in the year of 2016. Here’s to a new year!

This month’s near misses included: The Nix, The Daily Henry James, and The Gene: An Intimate History. See Also: Last month’s list.

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



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