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The Millions Top Ten: May 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 May.

This Month Last Month Title On List
1. 1. cover Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style
 5 months
2. 2. cover The Friend 6 months
3. 3. cover The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms 4 months
4. 5. cover Milkman
 5 months
5. 6. cover The William H. Gass Reader 6 months
6. 7. cover Educated: A Memoir
 4 months
7. 9. cover Becoming 2 months
8. – cover The New Me 1 month
9. – cover Normal People 1 month
10. – cover The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual 1 month

Patience gets undeserved hype because persistence is the real virtue. Persistence is active; it depends on a desire to change one’s status. Persistence relies on volition. Meanwhile anything can be patient if it sits around long enough. I am thinking of this today, nine months after The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual first appeared in our Top Ten posts… among the “near misses.” Since then, Ward Farnsworth’s book, which Ed Simon called an “idiosyncratic, strange, yet convincing and useful volume,” has made seven more appearances… among the “near misses.” It was only this month, roughly 250 days since we first caught its glimpse, that the book has made it to the actual Top Ten list… in tenth position. Persistence, friends. It’s patience plus positivity.

Two true newcomers joined our Top Ten this month as well: Halle Butler’s The New Me, which came out in March, and Sally Rooney’s Normal People, which followed in April. In our Great Book Preview, Anne K. Yoder called Butler’s second novel “a skewering of the 21st-century American dream of self-betterment.” Then, in a review for our site, Freya Sanders called Rooney’s latest “an unconventional bildungsroman that explores not the power of self-determination but the idea of the self as something generated between people.”

These three books found space on this month’s list because our Hall of Fame scooped up three more: Ling Ma’s Severance, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Kate Atkinson’s Transcription. For Ma and Atkinson, this is their first trip to our Hall, but Moshfegh has been there once before in 2017—her ticket stamped on the strength of Homesick for Another World.

Next month we inch closer to our Great Second-Half Book Preview, so buckle up.

This month’s near misses included: The Golden State, The Great Believers, Circe, Love in the New Millennium and Last Night in Nuuk. See Also: Last month’s list.

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



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