The Millions Top Ten: July 2009 – And Introducing the Hall of Fame

August 3, 2009 | 7 books mentioned 3 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 July. This month we’re also introducing our Hall of Fame. Any book that’s been on our list for six months graduates to the Hall of Fame both to designate those books as all-time favorites of Millions readers and to make room for new books on our list. Our Hall of Fame begins with two inaugural inductees.

This
Month
Last
Month
Title On List
1. 1. cover Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences 6 months
2. 5. cover Infinite Jest 5 months
3. 3. cover Olive Kitteridge 6 months
4. 6. cover The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker 5 months
5. cover Zeitoun 1 month
6. 4. cover Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste 5 months
7. 7. cover The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 5 months
8. cover The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 1 month
9. 10. (tie) cover Felonious Jazz 3 months
10. cover Netherland 2 months

Graduating from our list to our Hall of Fame are Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and Elaine Dundy’s Dud Avocado, two very worthy books to inaugurate this new feature. Also disappearing from the list are Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff.

Joining our list for the first time is Dave Eggers’ new book Zeitoun, an immigrant’s story in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. The book was recently featured on our “Most Anticipated” list. Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is our other debut. The Swedish writer’s series of posthumously published mysteries have gained quite a following in the States. The book’s only appearance on The Millions was to kick off a Book Question piece about “closed-room mysteries.” Millions readers, if you’ve read Larsson, let us know what you think.

Meanwhile, Joseph O’Neill returns to our list after appearing on our initial top-ten list at the beginning of the year and then getting bumped off. Maybe President Obama’s mention of the book a few months back is continuing to generate sales.

See Also: Last month’s list.

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