The Millions Top 10

The Millions Top Ten: February 2012

By posted at 11:40 am on March 2, 2012 3

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 February.

This
Month		 Last
Month		 Title On List
1. 2. cover The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life 6 months
2. 1. cover 1Q84 5 months
3. 4. cover Pulphead 3 months
4. 3. cover The Marriage Plot 5 months
5. 8. cover The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World 3 months
6. 6. cover The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains 3 months
7. 9. cover The Book of Disquiet 3 months
8. 5. cover The Art of Fielding 5 months
9. 10. cover Lightning Rods 5 months
10. - cover Train Dreams 1 month

Ann Patchett’s Kindle Single The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life lands atop our list, unseating Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, and another Kindle Single, Tom Rachman’s short-story ebook The Bathtub Spy, graduates to our Hall of Fame. (Rachman’s book The Imperfectionists is already a Hall of Famer.)

Debuting on our list is Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams, which won mentions from Adam Ross, David Bezmozgis, and Dan Kois in 2011′s Year in Reading series.

John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead was a big mover again this month, and Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World also jumped a few spots.

Near Misses: The Great Frustration, The Sense of an Ending, Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language, 11/22/63, and The Sisters Brothers. See Also: Last month’s list.

Related posts:





Share this article

More from the Millions

3 Responses to “The Millions Top Ten: February 2012”

  1. Charles
    at 1:14 pm on March 3, 2012

    I like the Millions a lot, but as I am broadening my reading more with ebooks and goodreads I am feeling more and more like these lists are a bit topheavy with the same old safe establishment names we see everywhere else. It’s like the literary blogs that only link to Mother Jones, the New Yorker, Slate and so forth, when there are plenty of indie magazines that are much more exciting, if marginalized. So it would be nice to see some indie voices on here too once in a while.

  2. Nick Moran
    at 2:02 pm on March 3, 2012

    Hi Charles,

    These lists are based on what our readers are buying, not on what the staff would necessarily rank in order of greatness.

  3. Steven Augustine
    at 6:29 am on March 4, 2012

    @Charles: pick up a copy of this novel and you won’t be disappointed:

    http://sayitwithstones.com/?p=447

    Full disclosure: I am an Internet Friend of the book’s author but when he mailed me a copy, I was not expecting to be so thoroughly wowed by reading it! The book deserves more attention and I’m doing my tiny (not futile, I hope) bit in comment threads…!

Post a Response

Comments with unrelated links will be deleted. If you'd like to reach our readers, consider buying an advertisement instead.

Anonymous and pseudonymous comments that do not add to the conversation will be deleted at our discretion.