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The Millions Top Ten: June 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 June.

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. 3. cover The Immortalists 5 months
2. 4. cover Less 2 months
3. 5. cover Fire Sermon
 6 months
4. 7. cover Frankenstein in Baghdad
 3 months
5. 8. cover The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
 6 months
6. 9. cover The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath
 3 months
7. 10. cover Lost Empress
 2 months
8. – cover My Favorite Thing is Monsters
 5 months
9. – cover An American Marriage
 1 month
10. – cover The Overstory
 1 month

 

Three books are off to our Hall of Fame this month, but one of them is completely blank, which I believe is a first for our site. Back in November 2017, in Hannah Gersen’s Gift Guide for Readers and Writers, she noted the benefits of the 5-Year Diary‘s design:

The design is unique in that every page represents one day and is divided into five parts, with each part representing one year. So, when you write your entry for Feb 1, you can look back at Feb 1 of the previous year to see what you were doing/writing/reading/thinking/weathering. I think it’s especially useful for writers because if you use the space to track writing and reading projects (as I often do), it’s a great way to gauge your long-term progress.

Accompanying the Diary are two works from Carmen Maria Machado and Jesmyn Ward.

Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties was the darling of our most recent Year in Reading series, picked by seven participants – Jamel Brinkley, Morgan Jerkins, Rakesh Satyal, Julie Buntin, Lidia Yuknavitch, Louise Erdrich and Jeff VanderMeer – who together sang a chorus of Buy this Book, Buy this Book, Buy this Book. Over the chorus came Nathan Goldman, who wrote in his review for our site that “for all its darkness, Her Body and Other Parties is also a beautiful evocation of women’s—especially queer women’s—lives, in all their fullness, vitality, and complex joy. Formally daring, achingly moving, wildly weird, and startling in its visceral and aesthetic impact, Machado’s work is unlike any other.” Evidently, Millions readers dug the tune.

Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing was also well-received, drawing praise from four of the seven Year in Reading participants linked above, as well as from Kima Jones and Sarah Smarsh. In her review for our site, Nur Nasreen Ibrahim observed that “Ward’s fiction is about inherited trauma in a deeply divided society, where the oppressor and the oppressed share a legacy” and she also pointed to the other works invoked within the text. “By invoking [Toni] Morrison and [William] Faulkner for new readers,” Ibrahim wrote, “Ward excavates not only the suffering of her characters, but also the long tradition of fiction about slavery, fiction that grapples with racial injustice that extends into the present.”

Elsewhere on our list this month, My Favorite Thing is Monsters returns after a monthlong hiatus, and newcomers An American Marriage and The Overstory fill our ninth and tenth spots, respectively. In the weeks ahead, we’ll publish our Great Second-Half 2018 Book Preview, and surely several of those upcoming titles will be reflected on our July list. Get ready.

This month’s near misses included: The Mars Room, Pachinko, Warlight, The Odyssey, and The World Goes On. See Also: Last month’s list.

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



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