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The Millions Top Ten: February 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 February.

This Month Last Month Title On List
1. 1. cover Norwegian by Night 3 months
2. 4. cover The Trespasser 5 months
3. – cover Lincoln in the Bardo 1 month
4. 5. cover Moonglow 4 months
5. 6. cover The North Water 3 months
6. – cover Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living 1 month
7. 8. cover Commonwealth 5 months
8. – cover A Separation 1 month
9. 4. cover The Underground Railroad 6 months
10. 7. cover Homesick for Another World 2 months

We sold so many copies of The Sellout over the past seven months that Paul Beatty’s novel is now off to our Hall of Fame, and if current trends hold it looks like it’ll soon by joined by Tana French’s The Trespasser and Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, too, has the Hall of Fame in its sights, although it’ll need to hang on for one more month, and momentum is not on its side – it dropped five spots on our list this month.

Newcomers on this month’s list include George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Katie Kitamura’s A Separation, and Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living edited by Manjula Martin. All three were previously featured on our Great 2017 Book Preview.

“Reading Lincoln in the Bardo is thus, itself, its own kind of bardo,” wrote Louise McCune in her recent review for our site, which bound the novel – Saunders’s first – to the Tibetan Buddhist concept of “something other than death.”

It is an intermediate state. In Buddhist cosmology, it is most commonly understood as the period of transmigration, between death and new life, when the consciousness is waiting on the platform for the proverbial next train.

Scratch, meanwhile, concerns itself with something far more immediate: money, and the making of one’s livelihood. The collection includes more than 30 essays, each focused on writers’ precarious quests to earn income from their craft. Its appearance on our list was no doubt aided by “Ghost Stories,” an excerpt from Sari Botton’s contribution to the anthology, in which the author highlights some of her “most memorable deals from almost two decades in the [ghost writing] trenches.”

For me, ghostwriting is a job — one I wouldn’t do if I didn’t need the money. Like any job, it has its pros and cons, its ups and downs — lots of freedom, the satisfaction of helping someone tell their story; but also, frequently, having to handle intense personalities with kid gloves.

Dropping out of this month’s list were Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am, which was not exactly celebrated on our site (citation), as well as Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, which most certainly was (citations 1, 2, 3, and 4). Until next month, I’ll leave it to y’all to sort that out.

This month’s near misses included: The Nix, Swing Time, and Hillbilly Elegy. See Also: Last month’s list.

The post The Millions Top Ten: February 2017 appeared first on The Millions.



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