The Millions Top Ten: October 2012

November 9, 2012 | 15 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 October.

This
Month
Last
Month
Title On List
1. 1. cover A Naked Singularity 4 months
2. 2. cover Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace 2 months
3. 5. cover This Is How You Lose Her 2 months
4. 3. cover NW 2 months
5. 4. cover Telegraph Avenue 2 months
6. cover Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story 1 month
7. 8. cover Gone Girl 3 months
8. 6. cover Bring Up the Bodies 6 months
9. 10. cover The Patrick Melrose Novels 5 months
10. cover A Hologram for the King 3 months

 

Our hurricane-delayed Top Ten for October has arrived. This month we see a new Paris Review anthology land on our list. We recently covered its creation in an interview with one of the editors. Meanwhile, Dave Eggers’A Hologram for the King returns to our list after a month off wandering in the desert.

A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava remains in our top spot (don’t miss Garth Hallberg‘s profile of De La Pava from June), and D.T. Max’s biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace holds on to the second spot (read the book’s opening paragraphs), and Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her (our review) leapfrogs other big fall books to land the third spot.

We had two books graduate to our Hall of Fame: How to Sharpen Pencils by David Rees (don’t miss the hilarious, yet oddly poignant interview) and Stephen Greenblatt’s Pulitzer winner The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.

Near Misses: Shakedown, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, An Arrangement of Light, The Fifty Year Sword, and New American Haggadah. See Also: Last month’s list.

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