The Millions Top Ten: January 2011

February 1, 2011 | 14 books mentioned 2 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 January.

This
Month
Last
Month
Title On List
1. 2. cover A Visit from the Goon Squad 6 months
2. 1. cover Freedom 6 months
3. cover The Imperfectionists 1 month
4. 4. cover Atlas of Remote Islands 2 months
5. 3. cover Room 5 months
6. 6. cover Super Sad True Love Story 6 months
7. 8. cover Cardinal Numbers 2 months
8. cover Skippy Dies 1 month
9. 10. cover Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption 2 months
10. 9. cover The Finkler Question 3 months

Goon Squad! In the last month on our list before they graduate to the Hall of Fame, Jennifer Egan’s underdog A Visit from the Goon Squad toppled Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom for our top spot. Egan’s book started with a lot of buzz last summer, and that buzz grew deafening over the course of 2010 (and into 2011) as it became the book to read among discerning fans of contemporary literature. Meanwhile, after months knocking on the door, Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists (not coincidentally just out in paperback) rockets onto our list with a debut appearance in third spot. Our other debut is another book that’s been much discussed around here, Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies. Rachman participated in our Year in Reading this year, as did Murray. Those two debuts took the spots vacated by our latest Hall of Fame inductees, a pair of summer reads that stayed hot as the weather got cold, Justin Cronin’s vampire tale The Passage and Tana French’s thriller Faithful Place. Near Misses: The Autobiography of Mark Twain, The Hunger Games, Postcards from Penguin: One Hundred Book Covers in One Box, Just Kids , and Woman in White. See Also: Last month’s list

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