The Millions Top Ten: September 2009

October 1, 2009 | 11 books mentioned 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 September.

This
Month
Last
Month
Title On List
1. 1. cover Inherent Vice 2 months
2. 2. cover Zeitoun 3 months
3. 8. cover The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 3 months
4. 6. (tie) cover The Skating Rink 2 months
5. (tie) cover Asterios Polyp 1 month
5. (tie) 10. cover Felonious Jazz 5 months
7. cover Cloud Atlas 1 month
8. cover The Year of the Flood 1 month
9. cover The White Tiger 1 month
10. (tie) cover Future Missionaries of America 1 month
10. (tie) cover Imperial 1 month
10. (tie) 9. cover Netherland 4 months

Four inductees to The Millions Hall of Fame plus gridlock in the tenth spot on our list meant room for plenty of new titles on the list in September.

Graduating to our Hall of Fame were four illustrious titles, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, Matthew Diffee’s The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker, and Carl Wilson’s Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. The former two titles are good examples of our readers’ taste in fiction (Wao in fact won our recent readers’ poll of the best fiction of the decade). The latter two are niche titles that sparked an enduring interest in readers despite relatively minor mentions at The Millions.

Newly appearing on the list are some recently published titles. Asterios Polyp, which we reviewed not long ago, Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and William T. Vollmann’s Imperial, which were both on our most recent Most Anticipated list, and Future Missionaries of America by Matthew Vollmer, who was an interviewer and an interviewee for us in June.

Also debuting are Cloud Atlas, which emerged as a big favorite in our Best of the Millennium project, and The White Tiger. That one’s a bit of a mystery because we haven’t talked about it much, but it did, of course, win the Booker Prize a year ago.

Finally, Inherent Vice and Zeitoun hold on to their positions, but there are still several new releases on tap for the fall, so they may be challenged soon for the top spots.

See Also: Last month’s list.

created The Millions and is its publisher. He and his family live in New Jersey.