The Millions Top Ten: January 2012

February 1, 2012 | 12 books mentioned

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

It was a quieter month for our list, with no new titles breaking in and 1Q84 still enthroned at #1. The big movers on the list were John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, which received a glowing write-up from our staffer Bill, and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, which Jonathan Safran Foer called a book that changed his life. With an array of hotly anticipated titles coming in February, we’ll see if any newcomers can break in next time around.

Near Misses: Train Dreams, The Sense of an Ending, Leaves of Grass, The Great Frustration, and A Moment in the Sun. See Also: Last month’s list.

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