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The Millions Top Ten: June 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 June.

This Month Last Month Title On List
1. 2. cover Lincoln in the Bardo 5 months
2. 3. cover A Separation 5 months
3. 4. cover Ill Will 3 months
4. 8. cover Men Without Women: Stories 2 months
5. 7. cover American War 3 months
6. 5. cover Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living 5 months
7. 9. cover Homesick for Another World 6 months
8. – cover The Nix 1 month
9. – cover Eileen 1 month
10. – cover The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake 1 month

 

One book dropped out, two ascended to our Hall of Fame, and that means three slots opened up for new titles on our June Top Ten. Before getting to the newcomers, congratulations are in order for The North Water author Ian McGuire, and especially for Derek B. Miller, whose Norwegian by Night dominated the Top Ten on the strength of Richard Russo’s recommendation. Both authors are off to the Hall of Fame this month. At the same time, Zadie Smith’s Swing Time has fallen off of the list after four months. Smith fans, fear not. In the past, authors have fallen off our list only to reappear later on, so it’s possible for her to send her second book (after NW, which reached in 2013) to the Hall of Fame in due time.

Filling the new slots are three very different books following three very different trajectories.

The Nix by Nathan Hill finally joins the June Top Ten after hovering among the “Near Misses” since last December. At the time, our own Garth Risk Hallberg highlighted the book’s “disparate concerns — video games, parental neglect, political anger” and praised the ways they’re “bound together by the warmth, charm, and wit of the author’s voice.” Nick Ripatrazone went further, invoking a lofty comparison in his teaser for our Great 2017 Book Preview:

Eccentricity, breadth, and length are three adjectives that often earn writers comparisons to Thomas Pynchon. Hill tackles politics more headlong than Pynchon in this well-timed release.

This is Hill’s first time on one of our monthly lists.

Ottessa Moshfegh, meanwhile, is no stranger to them. Impressively, Eileen is the second Moshfegh book on this very month’s Top Ten, after Homesick for Another World. It’s Ottessa Moshfegh’s world; we just live in it.

Finally, The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake launched onto our list thanks to an insightful, moving, and comprehensive review from Mike Murphy. “Breece Pancake could see the future of America and it must have scared the hell out of him,” Murphy writes of the late author, who took his own life in 1979, before this story collection was published posthumously.

This month’s other near misses included: The Idiot, Exit West, Enigma Variations, Blind Spot, and The Night Ocean. See Also: Last month’s list.

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



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