The Millions Top Ten: February 2012

March 2, 2012 | 12 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 February.

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

Ann Patchett’s Kindle Single The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life lands atop our list, unseating Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, and another Kindle Single, Tom Rachman’s short-story ebook The Bathtub Spy, graduates to our Hall of Fame. (Rachman’s book The Imperfectionists is already a Hall of Famer.)

Debuting on our list is Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams, which won mentions from Adam Ross, David Bezmozgis, and Dan Kois in 2011’s Year in Reading series.

John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead was a big mover again this month, and Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World also jumped a few spots.

Near Misses: The Great Frustration, The Sense of an Ending, Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language, 11/22/63, and The Sisters Brothers. See Also: Last month’s list.

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