The Millions Top Ten: July 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 July.

This Month	Last Month	Title	On List
1.	2.	The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms	6 months
2.	4.	The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual	3 months
3.	5.	Normal People	3 months
4.	7.	The New Me	3 months
5.	6.	Educated: A Memoir	6 months
6.	10.	The Golden State	4 months
7.	9.	Slave Old Man	2 months
8.	8.	Becoming	3 months
9.	–	The Nickel Boys	1 month
10.	–	Conversations with Friends	1 month

Both Milkman by Anna Burns and Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer graduated to our site’s Hall of Fame this month, marking each author’s first appearance on that hallowed list. Dreyer’s book also becomes the first style guide to appear on a list otherwise dominated by novels, albeit interspersed with occasional rarities including at least one treatise on sharpening pencils.

Meanwhile it’s heartening to see former site editor Lydia Kiesling’s debut novel The Golden State ascend toward the upper-half of this month’s Top Ten. The book belongs in your hands and on your shelves, but in order to get there it must first appear on our list. The higher it is, the farther it’s reaching, and so on.

Newcomers on this month’s list include The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead and Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney. Whitehead’s latest was recently featured in our Great Second-Half 2019 Book Preview, and surely it will soon be joined by additional titles on that massive list. (Have you read through it all yet?) It’s also noteworthy that Rooney now has two of her books listed simultaneously on our Top Ten, an extremely rare feat around these parts.

This month’s near misses included: Selected Stories, 1968-1994 (Alice Munro), On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Fever Dream, The Great Believers, and The White Card: A Play. See Also: Last month’s list.

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