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The Millions Top Ten: January 2019

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 January.

This Month Last Month Title On List
1. 2. cover Washington Black
 5 months
2. 3. cover The Incendiaries
 6 months
3. 5. cover The Friend
 2 months
4. – cover Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style
 1 month
5. 4. cover Severance
 3 months
6. 8. cover My Year of Rest and Relaxation
 2 months
7. 7. cover The William H. Gass Reader
 3 months
8. – cover Milkman
 1 month
9. 9. cover Killing Commendatore
 4 months
10. – cover The Golden State 2 months

Three spaces opened on our list this month, and filling them are two newcomers and one reappearance.

First, congratulations to Tommy Orange and Aja Gabel, whose novels There There and The Ensemble were so beloved by Millions readers that they’ve been immortalized forever in the site’s Hall of Fame. On the other hand, Kate Atkinson’s Transcription dropped out of the running after four months of strong showings on our list.

Keep faith, Atkinson fans. It’s quite common for books to leave our list one month only to reappear the next. How common? Well, the exact scenario just occurred with The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling. After debuting on our list in November, the book dropped off in December and has since reappeared to kick off 2019 in 10th position. At this rate, Kiesling will be joining Orange and Gabel in our Hall of Fame next September.

Two newcomers on our list this month are Milkman by Anna Burns and Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer. Burns’s novel won the 2018 Man Booker Prize for fiction and was briefly previewed by our own Carolyn Quimby last month, and is said to be “a story of the way inaction can have enormous repercussions.” Dreyer’s English, meanwhile, was described by Kiesling in our Great 2019 Book Preview as “a guide to usage by a long-time Random House copyeditor that seems destined to become a classic.” (I’ll echo Lydia’s request: please don’t copyedit this write-up.)

Next month’s list should open up for at least one new addition to our list, but as we’ve seen time and again: sometimes those new additions are blasts from the past.

This month’s near misses included: Becoming, The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms, The Practicing Stoic, and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. See Also: Last month’s list.

The post The Millions Top Ten: January 2019 appeared first on The Millions.



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