Skip to main content

The Millions Top Ten: February 2018

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.

Looking for additional book recommendations? One of the benefits of subscribing to The Millions is access to our exclusive monthly newsletter in which our venerable staffers let you know what they’re reading right now. Learn more here.

This Month Last Month Title On List
1. 1. cover 5 Year Diary 3 months
2. 2. cover Manhattan Beach 5 months
3. 3. cover Her Body and Other Parties 3 months
4. 4. cover Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process
 4 months
5. 5. cover Fire Sermon 2 months
6. 8. cover Little Fires Everywhere
 5 months
7. 7. cover Sing, Unburied, Sing 3 months
8. 10. cover The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
 2 months
9. 9. cover My Favorite Thing is Monsters
 2 months
10. – cover The Immortalists
 1 month

 

This month, the top half of our list is the same as it was last month. In fact, most of the list is the same as it was last month. What is it about February? Three years ago, we had the same thing happen, and I wound up calculating Shaquille O’Neal’s height in stacked books. It was as if I had been possessed by Harper’s “Findings” section.

But one person’s boredom is really another person’s consistency, and there is comfort in steadiness. On our list this month, the top half remains unchanged, but slight jostling occurred in the bottom. Two books graduated to our Hall of Fame: Victor LaValle’s The Changeling and Laurent Binet’s The Seventh Function of Language.

Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters fills one of the open spaces this month. Ferris’s fictional graphic diary had previously debuted on our December 2017 list, but dropped out last month, and is back again today. At that pace, look for it to reach our Hall of Fame around Thanksgiving. In her Year in Reading entry two months ago, Emily St. John Mandel said Ferris’s book “pierced [her] haze of unhappiness” and imparted “the sense of having encountered something truly extraordinary.” She raved, “Sometimes you read a book and you think, Oh. This is what a book can be.”

The other opening on this month’s list was claimed by Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists. In our Great 2018 Book Preview, Janet Potter previewed Benjamin’s second novel by saying it sounded so good that she’d have to “break [her] no-novels-about-New-Yorkers rule for this one.”

This month’s other near misses included: The Odyssey, Don’t Save Anything, Belladonna, My Absolute Darling, and Frankenstein in Baghdad. See Also: Last month’s list.

The post The Millions Top Ten: February 2018 appeared first on The Millions.



from The Millions http://ift.tt/2FTrh41

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more