The Millions Top Ten: January 2017

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.	Norwegian by Night	2 months
2.	2.	The Sellout	6 months
3.	4.	The Underground Railroad	5 months
4.	3.	The Trespasser	4 months
5.	5.	Moonglow	3 months
6.	9.	The North Water	2 months
7.	–	Homesick for Another World	1 month
8.	7.	Commonwealth	4 months
9.	–	Homegoing	1 month
10.	8.	Here I Am	5 months

New year, same frontrunner: Norwegian by Night, no doubt propelled atop our list on the strength of Richard Russo’s recommendation, begins the year in first position. On its heels, The Sellout, The Underground Railroad, The Trespasser, and Moonglow jostle around. Swing Time drops out of our rankings, which was perhaps a result of Kaila Philo’s underwhelmed review for our site:

Ultimately, while Swing Time makes admirable artistic choices — who doesn’t love a nonlinear narrative? — the main issue I take with this novel has to do with how these choices don’t mesh well to create the relevant masterpiece it could have been. The whole does not amount to the sum of its parts, in other words.

Ascending to our Hall of Fame, meanwhile, is Ninety-Nine Stories of God, the latest collection from Joy Williams, praised by our own Nick Ripatrazone (who provides a scant fifty reasons) here.

All of this action freed up spots for two newcomers on this month’s list, both of which were featured on our book previews: Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World (2017 Book Preview) and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016 Book Preview).

In Moshfegh’s case, the timing is logical. The book was previewed, it came out this past month, and y’all promptly bought it. But what explains Gyasi’s debut on our list almost a full year after we first previewed it, and half a year since it first published? Well, it recently won the John Leonard Prize for best debut novel. So there you go.

This month’s near misses included: The Nix, Pond, Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, and The Lyrics: 1961-2012. See Also: Last month’s list.

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