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The Millions Top Ten: October 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 October.

This Month Last Month Title On List
1. – cover Manhattan Beach 1 month
2. 3. cover Exit West 4 months
3. 4. cover Men Without Women: Stories 6 months
4. 6. cover The Seventh Function of Language: A Novel 3 months
5. 8. cover The Changeling 3 months
6. 5. cover Forest Dark
 2 months
7. – cover Autumn 1 month
8. 7. cover My Absolute Darling
 2 months
9. – cover Little Fires Everywhere
 1 month
10. 9. cover What We Lose 4 months

 

With Dan Chaon’s Ill Will and Omar El Akkad’s American War each off to our Hall of Fame, and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot dropping off our list, there’s room for three newcomers in our October standings – including a new #1.

Atop our list sits Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach, her fifth novel and her first in six years. Its immediate ascension indicates that, evidently, Millions readers were champing at the bit for a follow-up to the author’s 2011 Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad. In our Great 2017 Book Preview, Michael Schaub called Manhattan Beach “a noirish historical novel,” which like Goon Squad returns to New York City. Yet the similarities seem to end there:

At the Brooklyn Naval Yard, Anna Kerrigan becomes the nation’s first female diver, repairing ships that will help America win World War II. Through a chance encounter, she meets nightclub owner Dexter Styles, who she hopes can help her solve the riddle of her father’s disappearance years before.

Farther down in seventh position we find Ali Smith’s Autumn, which Claire Cameron identified as “the first novel in what will be a Seasonal quartet — four stand-alone books, each one named after one of the four seasons.” Smith, a Scottish writer, turns her attentions here to “time in the post-Brexit world, specifically Autumn 2016, ‘exploring what time is, how we experience it, and the recurring markers in the shapes our lives take.'”

Finally, we welcome Year in Reading alum Celeste Ng to our list. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, occupies the ninth spot. A few months back, our own Tess Malone remarked on how the book “tangles multiple families in a drama of class and race in a Cleveland suburb.”

Next month, Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women: Stories will surely graduate to the Hall of Fame, meaning at least one new spot on our list will open. Which book will take its place? Will it be one of the “near misses” below? There’s only one way to find out.

This month’s other near misses included: Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, and The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. See Also: Last month’s list.

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



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