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The Millions Top Ten: June 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 June.

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

This month Lydia Kiesling’s The Golden State published in the United Kingdom and Australia, so it’s fitting that it returns to our list. Kiesling’s debut novel tracks its protagonist through some unique stresses of motherhood, but in so doing, as the author noted this week in an Australian interview, we experience the more universal stresses quite vividly:

It was my feeling when I had a very young child, as someone who reads a lot, that I hadn’t really seen the minute-to-minute of care-taking portrayed on the page, and it struck me as somewhat unfair … [In those moments] you feel like you’re in some sort of epic, but one that has never really been commemorated on the page—as with going to sea, or going to war—but it can feel that big even though it’s an experience that we think of as fairly mundane. That was certainly something I thought about when I sat down to write: trying to transmit some of how relentless it can feel in the moment.

Another new arrival this month is Linda Coverdale’s translation of Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Slave Old Man, which recently won this year’s Best Translated Books Award in fiction. In an interview for our site, P.T. Smith spoke with Coverdale about her approach to translating the text:

My approach to translating has always been based on trying to make the English text reflect not just what the French says, but also what it means to native French-speakers, who are immersed—to varying degrees—in the worlds of their language, a language that has ranged widely in certain parts of the real world.

Elsewhere on this month’s list, Sally Rooney’s Normal People rose four spots to fifth position. This rise was so explosive it enabled her earlier novel, Conversations with Friends, to draft upwards as well, and now it ranks among this month’s “near misses.”

In the coming weeks, we’ll publish our annual Great Book Preview, so stay tuned for shake-ups to our list after July!

This month’s near misses included: Conversations with Friends, Last Night in Nuuk, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Congo, Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament, and My Sister, the Serial Killer. See Also: Last month’s list.

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



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