The Millions Top Ten: June 2012

July 1, 2012 | 15 books mentioned 1 2 min read

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. 5. cover Train Dreams 5 months
2. 6. cover Bring Up the Bodies 2 months
3. 7. cover How to Sharpen Pencils 3 months
4. 8. cover New American Haggadah 4 months
5. 9. cover The Swerve: How the World Became Modern 3 months
6. cover The Patrick Melrose Novels 1 month
7. 10. cover Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language 3 months
8. cover A Naked Singularity 1 month
9. cover Binocular Vision 2 months
10. cover The Flame Alphabet 1 month

Four books — John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, and Lewis Hyde’s The Gift — decamp for our Hall of Fame this month. The former three were brought to the attention of our readers during our Year in Reading series in December, while the latter anchored a holiday gift guide for writers.

With all those books departing, our new number one is Denis Johnson’s Pulitzer finalist Train Dreams. It also makes room for three newcomers on the list and a returning title, Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision. The debuts are Edward St Aubyn’s The Patrick Melrose Novels (reviewed here in February), A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava (profiled by Garth Hallberg) and The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus (we reviewed the book in early January and interviewed Marcus later in the month).

Near Misses: Leaving the Atocha Station, Open City, The Great Frustration, 11/22/63, and Gods Without Men. See Also: Last month’s list.

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