The Millions Top Ten: March 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 March.

This Month	Last Month	Title	On List
1.	1.	Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style	3 months
2.	3.	The Friend	4 months
3.	4.	Severance	5 months
4.	10.	The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms	2 months
5.	6	The William H. Gass Reader	4 months
6.	5.	Educated: A Memoir	2 months
7.	8.	Milkman	3 months
8.	7.	My Year of Rest and Relaxation	5 months
9.	9.	Killing Commendatore	6 months
10.	–	Transcription	5 months

March sent Esi Edugyan’s novel Washington Black to our site’s Hall of Fame, opening one spot for a newcomer on our list. As it happens, instead of a newcomer, we welcome something more familiar. Kate Atkinson’s novel Transcription had been on our Top Ten lists last September through December, yet for reasons unclear it dropped out of the running in January. Since then, it’s hovered in the “near misses” section at the bottom of these posts, and now it’s officially back as if to say, Spring is here and perennials return.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Dreyer’s instructive Dreyer’s English solidified its position in the top spot. Not long ago, our own Adam O’Fallon Price pondered the book’s popularity. “It would be difficult to think of a current subject that feels, superficially, less likely to top a list of best sellers,” Price wrote. “But beyond the pleasure of Dreyer’s prose and authorial tone, I think there is something else at play with the popularity of his book,” he explained. “To put it as simply as possible, the man cares, and we need people who care right now.”

Elsewhere on the list, little changed. Some titles swapped positions, some other titles moved up or down a spot or two, and outside the birds chirped and the planet spun and we completed just about one 12th of a rotation around the sun.

This month’s near misses included: Circe, Becoming, The Golden State, The New Me, and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays. See Also: Last month’s list.

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

from The Millions http://bit.ly/2uYbSbP

Comments

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...

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...

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...

TOBI'S DESK

Search This Blog